This machine is used to convert rolls of sausage casing and prepare them for the next step in production. The customer’s previous control system used an obsolete PLC that was no longer supported. The recipe system contained a handful of hard-coded recipes that could not be updated or added to and required the operator to enter dozens of parameters by hand for every job change.

DMC’s solution consists of Siemens hardware, a PC interface programmed in Microsoft Visual Studio, and a SQL Server database back-end. Recipes are easily added or modified through the flexible recipe management system, allowing the customer to immediately add more than 10 times the number of recipes stored on the old system. The system collects production data including production rate, up time, down time, and error incidents. All recipe and production data is stored both locally and on the network database.