Automatismes Girona

A mid-market Mexican feed manufacturer faced the challenge of connecting a distributed manufacturing facility to a unified central control system. Without centralized visibility, coordinating operations across multiple production areas was difficult, creating inefficiencies in scheduling and quality oversight. The absence of a resilient network architecture meant any system failure could halt production entirely — an unacceptable operational risk in continuous-process feed manufacturing. Fragmented control infrastructure also limited real-time responsiveness to equipment issues and made consistent throughput optimization across the facility difficult to achieve.

Automatismes Girona implemented an EtherNet/IP Device-Level Ring (DLR) topology to create a fault-tolerant industrial network connecting all facility nodes to a central control system. The architecture was built around Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PACs as the processing backbone, with Allen-Bradley POINT I/O modules deployed at the device level to capture real-time data from distributed equipment across the plant floor. DLR technology provides automatic network recovery — if a cable is severed or a device fails, traffic reroutes in milliseconds without interrupting production. Rockwell Automation's integrated hardware ecosystem allowed Automatismes Girona to unify previously siloed control systems into a single cohesive operational network, replacing legacy point-to-point wiring with a scalable, standards-based Ethernet architecture.

The DLR implementation delivered measurable operational improvements across the facility:

• Reduced production times and costs through streamlined, centralized control of distributed manufacturing processes
• Improved infrastructure quality, upgrading legacy connectivity to a modern industrial-grade Ethernet architecture capable of supporting future expansion
• Fault-tolerant operations: network or device failures no longer require full production stops — a significant improvement over previous failure modes

The shift to ring topology eliminated single points of failure that had historically forced costly, unplanned shutdowns, improving overall equipment effectiveness and operational reliability.

• DLR topology is purpose-built for distributed facilities where network resilience directly impacts uptime — evaluate it whenever a single cable fault can stop production.
• Centralized PAC architecture reduces control complexity across multi-zone facilities; ControlLogix provides the processing headroom for facility-wide coordination.
• Device-level I/O flexibility (POINT I/O) enables scalable expansion without rearchitecting the core network.
• Fault tolerance should be a design requirement, not an add-on — design for recovery from day one.
• Systems integrator expertise is critical: selecting a partner with deep knowledge of the vendor ecosystem reduces integration risk on facility-wide rollouts.