Plant Floor to Business System Data Exchange
Made Easy at Creamery
 Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA) is a farmer-owned dairy cooperative and is a national marketer of cheese, ice cream, butter, sour cream and yogurt. Its 140 farmer-owners depend on the creamery’s processing and quality control systems to provide the consistent product quality that have made Tillamook a popular selling brand throughout the northwest.
Although the cooperative was founded in 1909, making it nearly a century old, the methods it employs for quality control are anything but ancient. The cooperative’s latest investment is in a statistical process control (SPC) system to monitor the creamery’s cheese packaging process. Four high-speed scales are used to weigh cheese blocks before being wrapped and three are used to weigh the cheese again after packaging. The challenge faced by TCCA in applying SPC in this area was developing a cost-effective way to bi-directionally exchange the serial data from the seven scales with the creamery’s Microsoft SQL server database that is used in the SPC process. Values that needed to be sent to the database included product name, weight, packaging line, date and time.
Dan Dodge, TCCA’s IT manager and in charge of the SPC system, contacted Brent Boisen, a systems integrator located in Costa Mesa, California, who specializes in food processing, to help develop a solution for exchanging the serial weight data with the creamery’s SPC system.
Boisen reviewed the requirements with TCCA’s Dodge and suggested a new data exchange technology that he first learned about in Rockwell Automation’s The Journal. Rather than placing a PC with custom-configurable software in the packaging room to translate and transport data, Boisen recommended the use of the xCoupler enterprise transaction module from Online Development that installs into a ControlLogix PAC. Using the module as a basis, he designed a system using a converter to translate the scale’s serial data to Ethernet/IP data sent to the ControlLogix PAC via Ethernet.
The xCoupler module reads the weight data from the ControLogix backplane and then sends it to the Microsoft database via Ethernet. The module is equipped with an MSSQL business system adapter specifically for bi-directional data exchange between the database and ControlLogix PAC. “This was an easier and less costly solution than purchasing a PC and configuring software to exchange data,” Boisen says. “The xCoupler module simply snaps into the ControlLogix rack. After everything was installed and all connections were made, we opened up the module’s WorkBench configuration software and could immediately see all of the ControLogix tag data and Microsoft database tables. It was all ready to configure. If we had used a PC-based system, it would have taken many hours of programming to get to that point.”
Configuring the xCoupler module to enter specific data such as weight into a database table and receiving instructions from the database was also quickly accomplished. The WorkBench software features intuitive screens and dragging and dropping of tags into actions called triggers to eliminate the need to write lines of code. “While the WorkBench setup utility was easy to use, Online’s Laurie Wilson showed us some extra features that further reduced setup time and added functionality,” Boisen said. “One of those features is the module’s ability to synchronize the PAC clock with the database clock. That’s important because the PAC triggers the module to read the oldest scale data record and send it to the database. The module then sends a confirmation back to the PAC that the record has been sent to the database and the process continues.”
Another feature offered by the xCoupler module that was important to TCCA is its store-and-forward capability to prevent any loss of data. Should the database go down or become unavailable, the module stores the scale data in its flash memory and sends an email alert to an operator that a problem has occurred. Once the connection is resumed, the stored data is forwarded to the database.
Since the xCoupler module is an information appliance, and not a PC-based computer, there is little risk of viruses or hackers affecting the control or business system at TCCA. The module cannot affect the functional operation of the ControlLogix PAC or other devices connected to it, it simply exchanges configured data.
“I like the fact that Boisen was able to quickly show our people how to make changes to the xCoupler module’s operation using the password-protected WorkBench setup tool,” Dodge commented. “That gives us the ability to make changes in the future without incurring programming costs. Also, we don’t have to do anything to the module when other parts of the system are upgraded. As an appliance, it pretty much quietly does its job and stands on its own.” |
