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Customer Solutions

Lookout Automates Coffee Bean Processing

Author(s):

Massimo D'Attoma, Silocaf

Industry:

Food/Beverage

Product:

Lookout

The Challenge:

Automating blending of large batches of coffee to ensure consistency of product, confidentiality, and accuracy of customer consignment information, as well as fully integrating plant production with the inventory management system.

The Solution:

Using National Instruments Lookout automation software for the HMI of a Windows NT-based distributed control system to provide accurate batch processing, recipe management, reporting, statistical process control (SPC), and integration with the inventory management system through structured query language (SQL). In Lookout campaign 04/29/99.


Background
For hundreds of years, raw, green coffee beans have been shipped and traded in traditional ways. Until recently we have applied grain-elevator technology to handle, process, and stock this high-value commodity. However, this decade has shown rapid changes in coffee market trends, not only with the widespread appearance of specialty outlets, but also in international trade with a stronger interest in green coffee processing and bulk transportation.

The Italian shipping and forwarding group headed by Pacorini Finanziaria S.p.A.is a leader in this industry with two uniqueinstallations in Italy and in the UnitedStates, processing more than 6 million bagsof coffee on consignment every year. TheAmerican subsidiary of the group, Silocaf ofNew Orleans, Inc., has the largest facility ofits kind - a converted public grainelevator in thePort of New Orleans that dates back to theturn of the century. In 1996, we processedmore than 550 million pounds ofgreen coffee for third-party companies atthis three-year oldrefurbished facility. This amounts toroughly one-third of all U.S. coffee importsand a market value of $885 million.

Batching Process
The core of our operation is the batching system that we use for blend production. Because coffee is a natural product and certain supplies are seasonal, consistency of blend flavors is difficult to maintain. For this reason, we offer our customers the ability to blend coffee from different origins. We can achieve the desired consistency of blend flavors only through accurate and complex mixing. Our batching system makes this possible.

When refurbishing our plant, we installed typical equipment for the movement and processing of granular products, including bucket elevators, chain drag conveyors, bulk weighing systems, screening machines, and aspiration channels to move, weigh, and remove foreign material from the coffee beans. Our success at Silocaf is largely due to the flexibility of production capacity we achieved through high-level process automation.

System Requirements
At the end of 1996, in order to exploit the tremendous growth of information technology, we felt the need for a new supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. The selected SCADA system had to meet several criteria, enumerated below:

  • Because our application relies so heavily on custom recipes with every batch, the software had to have an exceptional recipe management capability.
  • Producing custom coffee blends requires unique customer billing capabilities, so the software’s batch reporting would be critical to our core business.
  • Blend accuracy to 0.5 percent is critical to customer satisfaction and ensures future business. We needed a package that could maintain strict statistical process control (SPC) over our batch processes.
  • Receiving tons of coffee beans a year from a dozen different countries poses some complex juggling between current inventories and batch production requirements. Solid handshaking between our inventory management system and the SCADA system would alleviate a lot of these problems.
  • Other, more general requirements included networking, computer redundancy, the ability to speak to a variety of PLCs, and the ability modify our software configuration online while we were actively processing batches.


Given these considerations, we chose Lookout by National Instruments, a 32-bit Windows-based HMI/SCADA software package. In addition to meeting the requirements listed above, we have discovered a few additional benefits of choosing National Instruments.

First, we found that the component object architecture of Lookout provides an extremely user-friendly development environment. It took us less time than expected to learn how to configure the object-based software and relatively little time to develop our Lookout project application. Second, National Instruments has an impressive program for continuous improvement that results in new releases for seamless upgrades every few months. Also, the company’s support staff has been very responsive to our needs.
Now our entire plant is monitored and controlled by Lookout. Graphics pages in Lookout represent our entire facility with symbols and status color-coding for each of the almost 300 devices. Also, more than 1,500 alarms in Lookout provide operators with immediate information about the status of the processes and help them avoid dangerous situations.

System Architecture
Lookout runs on Windows NT 4.0 workstation platforms. We chose Windows NT because of its stability and advanced security. Three of the Lookout stations are configured to communicate over their own subnet in an NT Server LAN, which isolates the control system network from the rest of the plant. One Lookout station acts as a server, communicating with the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and more than 5,300 I/O points over a local Tiway network. Operators at any Lookout client station can monitor and control the entire process. We are using the redundancy feature in Lookout to make one station available as a stand-by unit to take over communication with the PLCs in case there is a system fault in the primary server. When the stand-by unit is not acting as a server, it performs day-to-day duty as a client. The batching system is comprised of 52 automatic bulk weighing scales, up to 24 of which can operate simultaneously. This system is monitored and controlled by the Lookout automation software and seve-al Siemens PLCs. What we derived from Lookout was not only the reduced cost, but also the assurance of accuracy and confidentiality of customer information. Using Lookout, we also fully integrated plant production with our inventory management system - creating a cost-effective, easily maintainable system with higher system performance, process streamlining, and advanced integration through standards such as OPC and ODBC. As newer technologiesare made available, SCADA systems continue to evolve. Windows-based software is definitely the trend in the industry. As a user-friendly, Windows-based application, Lookout is an industry trend leader.

For more information, contact:

Massimo D’Attoma

Systems and Resources Mgr

Silocaf of New Orleans, Inc.

5240 Coffee Dr.

New Orleans, LA 70115-7755

Tel: (504) 896-7800

Fax: (504) 896-7834

E-mail: md@silocaf.com

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