How an OEM improved machine performance for customers

July 12, 2013 11:02 am

Discover how a food industry machine maker uses integrated architecture to improve a design engineer’s ability to reuse programming code and slash installation time
Just 20 years ago, sushi was still a rarity in America, confined mainly to Japanese restaurants in major cities like New York and Los Angeles. Today, American shoppers can pick up packs of ready-to-eat sushi easily in supermarkets and even convenience stores. The increasing international appetite for packaged sushi has driven demand for the short-grain, sticky rice, which, along with raw fish, forms the foundation of most sushi recipes. In turn, manufacturers who make sticky rice have come under pressure to ramp up production by adopting new cooking methods.
Many sticky-rice manufacturers begin as small, regional food processors. They operate industrial kitchens where the rice is cooked manually in oversised pots. To keep pace with the spreading popularity of sushi, many of these food processors need more sophisticated systems that can produce 500 to 2,000 pounds of cooked rice per hour.
Blentech Corp., a major manufacturer of custom equipment for food industry, recently created a new, fully automated continuous rice cooker that meets these rigorous output demands, while achieving the precise degree of “stickiness” desired by the customer. The preferred consistency varies among sushi suppliers, so Blentech custom builds each rice cooker and most of its other machines to suit each user’s specifications.
The California-based company also engineers various equipment, ranging from industrial-sise meat tumblers to batch cooking for sauces, soups and other liquids. About 70 per cent of Blentech’s customers are batch sauce processors which offer various ground- and diced-meat products, such as taco meat and Sloppy Joe mix.
Need for integrated designBlentech engineers begin every machine design with one of three standard templates for programming code: base, intermediate and advanced and then customise each program for specific machine capabilities, such as performance and throughput.
Until recently, Blentech’s engineers were reusing just 20-30 per cent of the programming code from the templates because they lacked a standard format for mapping performance data to the control system for each new machine. This includes vocabulary and definitions related to machine states or event data. For example, where one engineer might describe the abort state as a transition to the idle state, another engineer might describe it as the execution of holding state logic.
Without a single, integrated design and modular programming platform, inefficiencies were abundant, and engineers could only reuse a small portion of the template’s code for each design. As a result, engineers needed up to 7 weeks to code program settings, commission and calibrate each custom machine differently at a user’s site.
“We realised we needed to modularise programming code so engineers could readily reuse more of it to help reduce programming hours, maintenance and commissioning time,” explains Dan Voit, COO, Blentech. “Modular programming guidelines provide reusable definitions, structures and lines of code, so programmers can better leverage prior work.”
Unified control platformTo alleviate these design inefficiencies and get its customers up and running faster, Blentech partnered with Rockwell Automation, which 10 years earlier helped automate the company’s food-processing equipment. Blentech recently invested in Rockwell Automation Integrated Architecture, including the Logix control platform to achieve integrated motion and machine control, and RSLogix 5000 software to provide a single programming environment.

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