A Profile of our First Customer
Gilbert Chocolates is a chocolate company in Jackson, Michigan, and p1ge0n’s first customer. Their production consists mostly of manual processes, but they use PLCs to ensure that the chocolate is tempered correctly to ensure proper chocolate consistency and smoothness. One of the machines which has a PLC is the enrober, which heats up the chocolate and creates a chocolate waterfall to flow over the candy fillings, creating chocolate covered caramels and other delicacies.
When we first contacted Gilbert Chocolates about installing p1ge0n in their factory, they didn’t see a need for the software. Sure, they had a couple of Micro820 PLCs, but they wouldn’t ever need to receive alerts via text message or email, and they didn’t want to go through the bother of networking their PLCs as was required to connect to our software. They agreed, however, to let us run some initial tests of our software and installation process on their machines, and they were impressed when a text message arrived from p1ge0n within milliseconds of the machine’s trigger. During the process, we discovered some bugs and got them fixed later that week, not expecting anything further from Gilbert Chocolates.
A month or two later, we received a call. The PLC on the enrober was supposed to start up in the morning and have the chocolate tempered by the time production staff arrived at the facility. However, today, the temperature probe had failed, halting the program as the chocolate failed to achieve the target temperature. The tempering process had to be repeated instead of producing candy, costing valuable production time. During the summer months, this wasn’t a big deal, but with the major chocolate-selling holidays such as Christmas and Valentines Day coming up, this lost time would cause a much larger issue.
Delayed start time wasn’t even the worst-case scenario. During the tempering process, the chocolate is heated with a water bath and stirred automatically by the PLC program. If the temperature probe had said that the chocolate was warmer than it was and the machine started stirring cold chocolate, parts could break on the enrober due to the chocolate not being melted. The machine would have been down for days, and they would have had to pay for expensive replacement parts. If the temperature probe had said the temperature was too low, it would have continued to heat the chocolate, causing it to burn and requiring the whole day to be spent in cleaning the destroyed chocolate out of the machine.
We set up p1ge0n to send a text message if the temperature probe registered a value that was out of range, indicating that it had a fault. Additional notification scenarios may be identified, and it will be a simple process to add an additional trigger to send a message in the future. p1ge0n is bridging the gap between issues on the floor and the people who need to know about them. Contact us today to learn more.
