North American CPG Cleaning Products Company

A fast-growing maker of eco-friendly cleaning products had scaled from a single retail location to tens of thousands of stores across four continents in under 15 years — entirely through contract manufacturing. To meet rising demand and consolidate dispersed operations, the company committed to building its first in-house production facility. The target launch date was set less than a year after groundbreaking, creating intense pressure on the automation team. Without a scalable, flexible control system in place by that date, the company risked missing production commitments and undermining a facility designed for LEED Platinum certification.

Grantek Systems, a Rockwell Automation Solution Partner, deployed the PlantPAx Modern Distributed Control System (DCS) to manage ingredient transfer across six bulk supply tanks and five mixing tanks, plus delivery to the filling and packaging line. A staged implementation approach was agreed upon: operators would run processes manually at launch, with full automation following post-commissioning. The PlantPAx library of pre-configured process objects — including controller code, display elements, and faceplates for Endress+Hauser flow meters — significantly reduced low-level programming effort. The automated alarm builder tool handled alarm configuration at scale. Pre-allocated tags were embedded for a future FactoryTalk Batch integration, allowing operators to switch from manual to automated mode without rework. The modular architecture was also sized to accommodate up to two additional bulk tanks and ten additional mixing tanks.

The facility launched on schedule. The most significant time savings came from two PlantPAx capabilities:

• Alarm builder: Reduced alarm configuration from an estimated one week to a single day
• Pre-configured flow meter objects: Saved approximately two days of custom programming work
• Total commissioning time saved: More than one week across deployment

After launch, the five mixing tanks were fully automated by mid-March — the first tank took five weeks to program, but the remaining four were duplicated in just two weeks due to identical equipment logic. The staged approach allowed production to begin on schedule with single-shift, single-batch runs while full automation was completed in parallel.

• Pre-configured DCS process object libraries provide measurable commissioning savings — in this case, over a week — by eliminating repetitive low-level code on instrumentation like flow meters.
• Automated alarm builder tools can compress a week-long manual configuration task into a single day, a critical advantage on compressed timelines.
• A staged automation approach (manual first, automated later) is a viable strategy for meeting hard launch dates without sacrificing long-term system capability.
• Designing modular, duplicable equipment logic from the start enables rapid scale-out — four tanks automated in two weeks once the first was proven.
• Future integration paths (batch management, historian, MES) should be pre-wired into the initial architecture to avoid costly rework.