Beaverton Foods has been a customer of Horner Automation’s for over 6 years. Their filler machines have been in operation for 20 years. They still use SLC500 rack PLC’s (which are work horses), but they need to set up the machine for future upgrades and the old control equipment will not cut it. Beaverton’s outdated machines need to be updated due to the hardware not being supported anymore and the cost for replacement hardware and accompanying software is not cost effective.

The filler machine uses air actuators like pistons which are controlled by solenoids. With the current air cylinder actuated pistons, they can’t get proper even fills due to many factors including the pressure regulation of the cylinder. They need to have better control of the fill cycle since they are trying to fill less viscous liquids in small jars.

The answer is to use servo motors to get even fills. Horner’s Micro X5 all-in-one controller gives us the flexibility to upgrade our equipment for the future. Another feature that Horner PLC’s offer is the integrated HMI, which makes our operators more efficient, offering the ability to have recipes for the different products we run on these machines. The All-In-One controllers that Horner offers, make the upgrade more cost efficient for the company since we have a total of 4 lines that use these outdated fillers. We will do a test run on one machine so we can work out the bugs and then upgrade the rest.