Anonymous Global Beverage Manufacturer

A global producer of distilled beverages, beer, and wine needed to expand capacity at its Illinois plant while simultaneously replacing a non-standard legacy batch system that was creating significant operational drag. The existing system relied on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code and a legacy HMI for recipe management, had no redundancy, and required two to three batch corrections per batch — each correction consuming roughly two hours of testing time. Server failures could take the system offline for two to four hours. Security was minimal, with only three shared logins across the entire facility. As the plant expanded receiving, storage, and bottling capacity by approximately 75 percent, running these operations on an aging, non-S88-compliant system was no longer tenable.

Industrial Automation Group, a Rockwell Automation certified system integrator, implemented the PlantPAx Process Automation System — a modern distributed control system (DCS) — as the foundation for the plant's new batch control environment. The system was deployed in a fully virtualized environment using VMware vSphere, eliminating single points of failure and reducing unplanned downtime risk. PlantPAx provided an S88-compliant, scalable multi-discipline control platform integrating process and discrete control with intrinsically safe I/O and supervisory-level visualization. Data management and production management software were layered on top for process and batch control. Implementation followed a phased rollout: bulk liquid receiving areas came online first, followed by the new batching system. A two-week planned shutdown enabled final integration and tuning. During commissioning, 120 original recipes were recreated and 50 new recipes were introduced.

The plant achieved its primary target of no more than one batch correction per batch, down from two to three corrections under the legacy system — eliminating multiple hours of correction testing per batch run. Additional outcomes included:

• Increased throughput and system efficiency across receiving, batching, and bottling areas
• Automatic adjustment to raw ingredient variability, with the system updating parameters and recalculating ingredient amounts per recipe without manual intervention
• Streamlined recipe management: shared unit procedures across recipes reduce development time; material manager functionality eliminates recipe rewrites when materials move between tanks
• Improved security: individual logins, e-signatures, and 15-minute automatic sign-out replaced the previous three-credential shared system
• Enhanced CIP reporting: automated sequencing and report generation after each clean-in-place cycle

• Legacy batch systems running on VBA and non-S88-compliant architectures carry compounding quality and availability risks — migration pays off when expansion creates a forcing function.
• Server virtualization with full redundancy is a practical path to high availability in food and beverage batch environments where unplanned downtime directly affects production throughput.
• S88 compliance unlocks shared unit procedures across recipes, significantly reducing the effort to introduce new SKUs or product variants.
• Phased implementation — bringing new assets online before decommissioning legacy systems — allows rigorous Factory Acceptance Testing without a full production halt.
• Auto-adjustment to raw ingredient variability should be treated as a core requirement, not an enhancement, in beverage manufacturing where incoming material properties fluctuate.