Project
Bogasari Flour Mills is not only the largest integrated flour miller in Indonesia but also the largest installation of its type in a single location anywhere in the world. It has two flour mills in Jakarta and Surabaya with a daily production capacity of 10,000 tons of wheat. In line with the continuously growing demand for flour products, more and more companies have established milling operations in Indonesia dropping the market share of Bogasari from about 90% to about 60%. “Our main challenge is quality; we need to make sure that the quality is high and uniform for all the batches” says Christianus S. Kaluli, Vice President, Technical Support, addressing this rising competition. Apart from quality, Christianus notes, that capacity is also an issue. “Our Jakarta plant is now more than 40 years old. That is why we need to upgrade some of our systems by migrating them to newer models and versions to increase their capacity, and improve their yield and efficiency.
Solution
Bogasari was initially using PROFIBUS as the communications platform for its HMI, controllers and I/Os. But they sometimes had issues regarding I/Os of their field devices e.g. between PROFIBUS and the Ocrim milling system. “If one system fails, the whole network goes down, thereby halting production with substantial capacity losses within that period”, Christianus says.
Ato Ansori, a Siemens Partner in Indonesia, worked with Bogasari regarding the system upgrades at its mills. “Regarding migration, we have to know completely what the existing applications are – from the basic applications like the HMI, or SCADA, to advanced applications like reporting, or communications, or interfacing with another software. Sometimes, the engineers do not use standard software and this will create errors during conversion.
To address the above issues, Bogasari worked with Java Diamond to migrate its PROFIBUS network to PROFINET using the proxy technology for integrating of the existing PROFIBUS instruments. “After we migrated to PROFINET, we will get just message alerts if there are some issues, for instance, 300ms or 400ms of failure, and therefore we don’t need to stop the plant.
Conclusion
With the migration from PROFIBUS to PROFINET, Christianus says, the reliability of the system is higher than before. He notes that now, they can also pinpoint the particular field device that is causing problems in the production. “It made the system more robust and flexible in topology,” Christianus notes. “After the migration to PROFINET, the operator now gets the error message easily – which, sometimes could just be a network disconnect. The important thing here is that there are no more production halts or disruptions. If it is a critical operation, then it will be stopped; but otherwise, it will just continue.”
Reference: CONTROL ENGINEERING ASIA, November-December 2014