DuPont

DuPont's isolated soy protein and food ingredients plant in Esteio, Brazil faced a critical control system crisis: its legacy distributed control system (DCS) had reached end of service life with no remaining manufacturer support, leaving the facility exposed to unplanned outages with no recourse for repairs or spare parts. The aging infrastructure involved large I/O point counts across both DCS and PLC systems — a complexity that made a rushed migration particularly hazardous. In the chemicals and food ingredients sector, unplanned production stoppages carry severe costs in spoiled batch material, regulatory compliance risk, and lost customer commitments. The plant had a narrow three-week window to complete the migration without interrupting production.

DuPont partnered with Rockwell Automation to replace the obsolete control infrastructure with the PlantPAx modern distributed control system — a process-optimized DCS built on the Logix control platform and designed for seamless integration with existing plant instrumentation and I/O architectures. The migration leveraged IoT-connected sensors and field devices already in place, re-homing them into the PlantPAx environment to preserve validated process data flows while upgrading supervisory control capabilities. Rockwell Automation provided on-site technical consultants and engineering support throughout the cutover. To meet the three-week deadline, a coordinated team of more than 60 professionals drawn from eight companies executed parallel workstreams covering wiring, configuration, testing, and operator training — an approach that compressed what is typically a multi-month effort into a single planned shutdown window.

The migration was completed on schedule within the three-week window, with no unplanned production loss reported. The new PlantPAx DCS delivered measurable operational improvements across several dimensions:

• Increased availability: Modern hardware with active manufacturer support eliminated the single-point-of-failure risk posed by the unsupported legacy system
• Faster maintenance agility: Standardized diagnostics and remote-accessible architecture reduced time-to-resolution for process faults
• Better cost control: Predictable lifecycle management replaced the unpredictable cost exposure of maintaining obsolete components
• Improved flexibility: Open, standards-based architecture enables future expansion and integration with higher-level plant systems without proprietary lock-in

• Plan the migration before the failure — executing on a known schedule is far less costly than an emergency replacement after an unrecoverable system failure
• Multi-vendor coordination requires a single system integrator with authority to manage parallel workstreams across teams; Rockwell Automation's engineering consultants played this role here
• Large I/O migrations benefit from phased parallel execution — splitting configuration, wiring, and testing across concurrent teams is what made a three-week window achievable
• Modern open-architecture DCS platforms reduce long-term lock-in risk, giving process plants flexibility to evolve control strategies without proprietary constraints
• Operator acceptance is accelerated when the replacement platform shares familiar Logix-based HMI conventions, reducing retraining burden during cutover