Gipsy helps BAT Crane Upgrade
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British American Tobacco's (BAT) automated manufacturing plant in Southampton
was installed back in 1991, and the management team now faces the dilemma of
how to upgrade parts of this system without affecting production. This is a
common problem that faces many companies with ageing automated systems.
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BAT wanted to refit all 6 automated stacker cranes with a modern control system
but the interfaces to such modern equipment were incompatible with the existing
Warehouse Control System (WCS). To overcome these incompatibilities, Lifetime
Software's Gipsy Crane product was chosen.
Gipsy (Generic Interface for PLC Systems) is a flexible interfacing product
that converts between interfaces, allowing non-compatible equipment to
communicate. Special modules can be added to Gipsy and configured to
communicate using a wide range of standard or bespoke interfaces.
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Gipsy Crane managed communications to both old and newly refitted cranes
simultaneously, allowing the cranes to be refitted and returned to production
one by one without any major disruption to BAT's manufacturing operation, and
without any changes to the WCS.
The local crane control functionality of Gipsy Crane proved extremely useful to
BAT for commissioning the new cranes, as this allows commands to be sent to the
crane to fully check the cranes operation before returning the cranes to
production.
An extra benefit of choosing Gipsy Crane is the Gipsy Statistics package which
collects detailed statistics of the crane operations and utilisation, allowing
BAT's management team to monitor the efficiency of their warehousing operation.
Comment from Phil Harris - BAT Project Manager:
"When carrying out any changes to a major control system - continuity to
production is extremely important. The decision to choose GIPSY as the
interface between our existing WMS and the new CSA Crane control was quite a
simple one.
We saw that the interface would work with our current crane control system and
was transparent to the users. GIPSY also played a key role in the off-site
commissioning of the new CSA crane system - our engineers were able to fully
test the communications to the new system and resolve any issues prior to the
changeover.
When commissioning each new crane system it was possible, using GIPSY, to test
the function of the cranes without interfering with the WMS. This reduced the
overall commissioning time considerably.
Additional features such as the statistics package will play a key part
in evaluating the new crane controls against the previous one."
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