Anonymous Food Industry Supplier

A major food industry supplier — one of the world's largest producers of specialty fats for the chocolate and confectionery sector — operated the UK's largest edible oils refinery on a 24/7 basis with no tolerance for unplanned stoppages. Over time, its control infrastructure had grown into a fragmented collection of legacy PLCs and RSView32 HMI SCADA systems that were approaching end-of-life. Obsolescence risk was increasing: spare parts were harder to source, vendor support was narrowing, and the patchwork architecture made plant-wide visibility difficult. For a continuous-process facility where even brief downtime carries significant production and food-safety consequences, maintaining aging SCADA on critical lines had become an unacceptable operational risk.

Boulting Group, a Rockwell Automation Recognised System Integrator, led a phased migration from RSView32 to FactoryTalk View SE running on Allen-Bradley ControlLogix and CompactLogix PACs, underpinned by a plant-wide Ethernet network. The defining deployment decision was full virtualisation: two physical servers hosted redundant virtual machines using VMware, allowing the entire SCADA application — including all converted HMI displays and tag-based alarms — to be built, configured, and acceptance-tested off-site before a single production line was touched. The new and legacy systems ran in parallel during cutover, with clients migrated individually from RSView32 to FactoryTalk View SE until all 15 operator clients and three view-only clients were transitioned. A documented fallback procedure was maintained throughout, enabling the site to revert to the incumbent SCADA if any issue arose.

The virtualisation-led approach delivered the project's primary objective: negligible downtime across a facility running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

• 95% of commissioning completed offline, replicating full plant operation including undocumented I/O, before any on-site work began
• Concurrent SCADA operation during handover eliminated hard-cutover risk and allowed client-by-client validation
• Improved asset utilisation and reduced total cost of ownership versus maintaining disparate legacy hardware
• Enhanced functionality from FactoryTalk View SE V9, including improved stability and a path to Connected Enterprise integration

The customer's Senior Electrical Projects Engineer noted the offline testing went beyond what is normally expected, with Boulting addressing every I/O point, including those not covered in existing documentation.

• Virtualise before migrating: building the replacement SCADA in a virtual environment off-site is the single most effective lever for eliminating production downtime during HMI upgrades.
• Run systems in parallel: maintaining old and new SCADA concurrently during cutover allows per-client validation and a credible fallback — essential in 24/7 food manufacturing.
• Document the undocumented: thorough offline testing should include all I/O, not just what appears in engineering drawings; undocumented signals are a common source of on-site surprises.
• Phase the migration: a multi-year, area-by-area rollout reduces per-event risk and lets the team build confidence with each completed section before proceeding.
• Standardise on a single platform: consolidating onto one SCADA and PAC family simplifies spares, training, and future Connected Enterprise integration.