Promtek’s Condor™ platform + control system = energy efficiency

At Promtek, we’ve learned a thing or two in our 50-year history about the power of recipes. We understand how clients apply our technology to squeeze incredible results out of their ingredient-handling equipment by using recipes along with their historical data – to optimise dosing operations, to control stocks and to meet stringent industry standards – all while maintaining flexibility for their customers.

Changing business needs

The business environment today is no less challenging than it was 50 years ago, with disruption to global supply chains, increasing government regulation, greater access to company data weighted against rising cyber security demands, and a growing awareness of the dual need for environmental and financial sustainability. These global factors are pushing clients in previously unexpected directions, creating opportunities to introduce new suppliers, new processes, new solutions and of course, new problems.

In Promtek’s experience, industry sectors whose manufacturing systems use Bills of Materials (BOMs) as recipes have remained resilient, as this has allowed them to introduce new ingredients with minimal impact on either compliance or finished product quality. This has, however, resulted in more waste as well as lost time from equipment that wasn’t specifically designed to handle those ingredients, thereby affecting performance and unfortunately also increasing climate impacts.

The response from Promtek’s UK and South African teams to the changing business environment has been fantastic. The power of recipes has been instrumental in expertly positioning us to help our clients adapt to these challenges quickly and effectively, often using their existing IT and OT infrastructures.

We’ve worked closely with our client base over the last five years, recruited a new team and built our smart new Condor™ manufacturing platform from scratch. Condor™ complements our well-established recipe-handling process control and automation products. It integrates beautifully with IT and OT products from a variety of well-known ERP providers as well as Promtek partners such as PEMAC, who offer an industry-leading computerised maintenance management system.

Engineering innovation

The real innovation that makes all of this possible sprang from the creative genius of the Promtek engineering teams, who transformed the humble recipe into a powerful business tool. The new Condor™ platform enables a business to link process instructions to Bills of Materials, which the process controls and automations then apply in real time to change the way the operators and the factory equipment behave. The platform can also use performance records from previous batch recipes to set targets for the next production orders, which helps to detect and eliminate negative trends.

Crucially, the platform verifies results from connected OT systems and links historical data to the product via its recipe, providing vital and traceable data on operator and equipment performance at process, ingredient and recipe levels.

The result is a highly configurable platform with finely tuned features that are relevant to any ingredient and recipe-handling industry, which Promtek clients can adapt and develop to suit their needs. It has energy efficiency and performance management built into its core, to enable clients to accurately assess their climate impact and analyse significant areas of manufacturing costs.

At Promtek, we actively participate in a number of industry-relevant associations to understand trends and drivers of environmental change, which in turn inform our research and development activities. This allows us to support our customer base while avoiding a reliance on solutions driven by only one customer or one specific market sector.

Bespoke integration

The Condor™ platform is designed to seamlessly and securely integrate all business IT applications and specialist OT control systems and software found in a production facility. It can be deployed on-site as a dedicated, bespoke installation, or as is often more cost-effective, hosted centrally and then integrated remotely into factory operations.

The latter set-up allows recipe instructions and product performance expectations to be standardised between factories, while allowing those factories to adapt the recipes to local ingredient and process capabilities. The standard platform reports that are generated enable different production facilities to be benchmarked in a meaningful way.

The platform is built as a web-based modular integration with rigorous user-specific security properties which are centrally managed. It provides a primary overview by connecting to multiple systems such as process control systems, ERP or PLC/SCADA to aid production planning and to check production quality and history.

This connection enables clients to tailor Condor™ to their specific needs in creating and managing ingredients and finished products. It also allows clients to manage and monitor a range of raw material parameters such as tolerances, densities, families, cross contamination, authorised routes, mixer settings, energy usage and many more.

One of the major benefits of this essential integration is the capability to translate all the data provided by the connected sources into a better and more accurate picture of how and when energy is being consumed. This information gives a vital “before” and “after” comparison which demonstrates the measurable impact of investment in changes to processes and recipes.

Energy efficiency

The Condor™ platform’s features support energy efficiency by recording and reporting energy usage in kWh/t in real time for every ingredient, product, route, work centre and shift, allowing their performance to be compared. They integrate systems with smart motor controls and sensors to pull live production data directly from the factory floor.

This integration drives predictive maintenance and reduces unplanned downtime, as well as loss of throughput capacity, unnecessary stops for repairs and tying up capital in large stocks of spare parts. The result is reduced CO2e emissions, improved production performance and optimised equipment longevity.

The features also allow facilities to visualise and plan work orders before they are transferred to production, evaluate and mitigate cross-contamination risk, minimise waste from flushing and cleanouts and eliminate production time lost to rework and reprocessing. Vitally, they enable the verification and reporting of total CO2e per batch, product and ingredient to support a wider net zero strategy and to identify potential impacts and areas for improvements in pursuit of reducing emissions.

By using the Condor™ platform, companies will be able to collect and share valuable, trustworthy data about energy consumption, waste, recycling and reworks and emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that will help them to make strategic investments in meaningful change and demonstrate their achievements in sustainability and efficiency. This enables businesses to compete more effectively in their markets, improve their market position and consistently deliver authentic and ethical value to their environmentally conscious customers and stakeholders.

Contact Promtek:

01782 375600
sales@promtek.com
www.promtek.com