Manufacturing Consulting Case Studies

Hagerman’s manufacturing consulting team has helped clients from many different industries find solutions to problems and continue on to be more efficient and resilient than ever before. Some examples of our manufacturing process consulting and control system customization services that our clients have benefited from are highlighted in the case studies below.

 
 

Grain Processing

The owners of an agricultural grain elevator wanted to enhance the transfer and storage of farm crops.

Challenge:

  • Eliminate human errors to prevent misplaced and over-fulfilled product

Solution:

  • Designed a system utilizing RFID technology to identify the trailer contents and then automate the transfer of product to the drying process or to correct silo storage.

Agriculture Industry

A large agriculture industry manufacturer needed an advanced, positive pressure ventilation system to protect livestock from airborne pathogens. The system forces filtered air out of a building, preventing unfiltered, outdoor air from entering the animal living areas that might otherwise be compromised from air leaks or open-air inlets in a negative pressure environment. This reduces the chance of exposure to airborne pathogens providing an effective solution for maintaining healthy air quality for animals.

Challenges:

  • Reduce overall system cost to end customer through energy conservation.
  • Design user friendly system for monitoring and maintaining building temperature and pressure.
  • Develop system maintaining balance between static and variable speed fans.
  • Capability needed to remotely diagnose and troubleshoot systems.

Solutions:

  • Developed program to operate static and variable speed fans according to user parameters.
  • Developed user interfaces and secure remote access control.
  • Designed and manufacture system UL control panels.
  • Maintain program version control remotely as a disaster recovery safeguard.

Consumer Packaging Industry

A major manufacturer of paper cups, paper containers, and plastic lids needed to automate and enhance their barcode labeling process for their finished packaging process.

Challenges:

  • Supervisory control system outages due to antiquated control hardware
  • Old PC’s and servers with no back-up systems in place.
  • Massive loss of data due to lack of disaster recovery protocol.
  • Critical equipment was experiencing large amounts of downtime.

Solutions:

  • Designed robust industrial network to facilitate human-to-machine interfacing.
  • Integrated system analytics and machine reporting.
  • New design leverages redundancy to minimize risk to data loss.
  • System wide upgrade the current application versions.
 

Results: 

  • Increased system uptime and vast reduction of machine downtime.
  • Increased process visibility.
  • Highly expandable for rollout to multiple locations and company growth.
 

Challenges

  • Customer requirements dictate updating of barcoding process for improved traceability.
  • Automation update required, due to customer barcode and date/time stamp requirements.
  • Minimize manual label applications.

Solutions:

  • Integrate solution to existing ERP system.
  • Add print and apply barcoding stations to automate labeling process.
  • Redesign conveyor system to accommodate material flow and barcode station throughput.
  • Integrated conveyers, scanners, conveyor scales, print and apply labeling stations and verify scanners to handle multiple assembly line products simultaneously ensuring each finished good was properly labeled.
  • Highly expandable for rollout to multiple locations and company growth.

Safety Improvements

 

Challenges:

  • An industrial packaging manufacturer needed to safeguard multiple workstations

Solutions:

  • Hagerman performed risk analyses on several processes, then designed and implemented solutions reducing human risk of injury to an acceptable level.

Reactive Balance System Manufacturer

A manufacturer of rehabilitation & performance enhancing equipment asked us to upgrade their control systems and replace obsolete components in order to replicate their machinery while making it run more effectively, optimizing their service life, and reducing the overall manufacturing costs. 

Challenges:

  • Servo driven components going obsolete and prices were increasing by more than 115%
  • Sourcing cost effective replacement parts.
  • System redesign to accommodate new components.
  • Facing major 10% product cost increases or shut down of product sales.

Solutions:

  • Found cost effective replacement actuator, with only minor engineering change to structure.
  • Upgraded PLC & HMI programming and control components to eliminate obsolescence challenges in future.
  • Hagerman designed & manufactured the control panel for reactive balance system.

City Water Treatment facility

A city’s water treatment plant came to Hagerman with an immediate need of not being able to produce clean water.

Challenges:

  • Power outage caused loss of control program.
  • System was not capable of starting, immediate need.

Solutions:

  • Reinstall control program.
  • Modified program to accommodate recent electrical modifications.
  • Restart and debug.
 

Challenge: 

  • System was not generating clean water, immediate need.

Solution:

  • Troubleshoot root cause through access to controller; modified PLC programming to get system up and running
  • Discovered system had pressure, but no water flow. 
  • Discovered vapor lock causing no flow situation, problem solved quickly after.

Let’s talk strategy

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