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Exploring customized control solutions for feed mills
27 Plays3 months ago
In this episode of the Feed & Grain Podcast, host Steven Kilger dives into the intricacies of feed mill automation with special guest Deon Considine, a sales engineer and the sales manager at Sterling Systems & Controls. This episode explores the importance of customizing control solutions to enhance feed mill efficiency and productivity. Considine shares his extensive 30-year experience in the industry, discussing the benefits of transitioning to automated systems, key considerations for upgrades, and emerging trends in feed mill technology. Learn how tailored automation can transform operations, maximize efficiency, and adapt to the unique needs of each feed mill. Whether you're an industry veteran or new to the field, this episode offers valuable insights into optimizing feed manufacturing processes. Tune in for a comprehensive discussion on enhancing your feed mill's performance.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Message
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my name is Stephen Kilger. I'm the managing editor of Feeding Grain magazine and host of the Feeding Grain podcast. Thank you so much for listening today as we dive deep into the issues affecting the feed manufacturing, grain handling, and allied industries. Today's episode is brought to you by the Binwip from Numat Systems. The powerful dual impact Binwip removes the toughest buildup and blockages in industrial storage silos without hazardous silo entry. Learn more today at binwip
Guest Introduction and Background
00:00:25
Speaker
.com. Today I'm talking with Dion Considine
00:00:27
Speaker
sales engineer at Sterling Systems and Controls. He's here to talk about why feed mills should consider customizing their control solutions to fit their operation, what should be considered before any control solution upgrade, and how best to transition to a new system. I hope you enjoy the interview. If you want to help out with the podcast and are listening to this in a podcasting app, please rate us and subscribe. If you're listening online, sign up for the Feeney Grain newsletter industry watch to see when all the new podcasts drop and to stay up to date with all the news from around the industry. Now,
00:00:57
Speaker
On to the show. Hi, Dion. Thanks so much for joining the podcast today. No problem, Stephen. How are you today? I'm doing great. I hope you're doing well. Um, for anyone who might not know you or your work in the industry, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your experience in the feed industry? Yeah. So I'm with drilling systems controls. I've been with drilling system controls for 30 years, celebrated that last November. So coming up on 31 here shortly.
00:01:27
Speaker
Been in sales, I actually agreed in electrical engineering technology from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and then really came into the industry right into sales and I enjoy it a lot. I get to see a lot of different industries, very interesting, keeps you on your toes and both customers and you know, technology and each industry does things a little different.
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah. Well, with 30 years, you mostly have a lot of experience. I love our industry because it seems like one of the few industries where people really like stay in it and stay at a company for a really long time, which just kind of gives you this perspective that you might not see if you jump around a lot. Right.
Need for Customized Control Solutions
00:02:07
Speaker
And I think, you know, there's some of that people worry about homesteading. Sometimes it's referred to different entities, but
00:02:14
Speaker
But sometimes you don't get to see a lot of things outside the box, you know, and you kind of get caught in that pipe from, you know, top to bottom, because that's all you've seen. But with my experience, having to see different industries all across the board, it helps to bring some of that thought process back to the feed industry sometimes. And a lot of times the feed industry goes out because from the 30 years experience I have is a feed mill is probably the most demanding
00:02:42
Speaker
on a batching system than anything that I've really encountered. Chemical can be there close, but the feed industry is very, it's so customized for the end user, for the customer, the feed mill customers to where they have to have hundreds of ingredients, thousands of formulas stored just because everybody has their own unique way of doing things.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah. And it's not like we're a huge, huge industry, right? Especially here in the United States, there's only so many females and it seems like for them, they're all laid out a little differently. They all take slightly different ingredients. They all do slightly different formulas. So it's the reason we have Jan here to talk today is kind of about getting their automation and control solutions customized for what they need. Can you tell me a little bit more about why a customized solution
00:03:34
Speaker
Might be better for them than say you know buying something off the shelf in kind of just trying to get it to work with your setup yes a lot of times you know. Off the shelf it's pretty much a cookie cutter this is the way it is in there you know a lot of times you're trying to take a square peg and put it in a round hole eventually force it in there but.
00:03:54
Speaker
So for a customer that already has an existing process and you're trying to retrofit or upgrade or even a new mill, that's one thing that we specialize in is we really customize it to the way the customer's equipment is and processes. And we've heard that from a lot of our customers that they appreciate that we take the time and listen to them and customize it
00:04:20
Speaker
to their application. So we've heard on the retro side of it where also customers have complained that other companies are too rigid and then it doesn't give them the flexibility they need. So that's something we pride ourselves on is that customization. It seems like the quicker you get someone like you involved in the whole process,
00:04:40
Speaker
seems like the better.
Implementing Control Solutions
00:04:42
Speaker
What should feed companies kind of start when they want to implement a control solution like this? Where do you start? What do you call you? Do you take a look? Do they make an inventory of all their equipment? How do they kind of go about this process? I mean, for us, a lot of times it all starts with a flow diagram, a process or an ingredient flow. So it kind of takes the ingredients through the equipment for the flow diagram. So a lot of times,
00:05:07
Speaker
You know, a green site usually is one of the first things we get to see. For an existing customer, a lot of times it's, you know, they may have that documentation, but if they don't, a lot of times we'll do a site visit and from there we can kind of look at the equipment, talk to the customer and sketch that process out. A lot of times we'd like to present the flow diagram to the customer to make sure we truly understand their process and we'll go back and forth with the customer to get that right. So that way then.
00:05:37
Speaker
When we move forward with the proposal, we know that it's correct. Yeah. What are the major kind of factors that would, uh, I guess need a big change from what you do, like standard. So like, is it the way they receive rain? Is it the amount of formulations they make? Cause a lot of ingredients they use. What are kind of the big things that might change your automated control systems? Yeah. A lot of times with that is just going to be with a proposal. Everything is driven off of IO or inputs and outputs, all the equipment. So.
00:06:07
Speaker
A big piece of it is receiving. Is there one or two receiving legs? A lot of times there's a grinding process in the intermediate between when you receive and withhold corn, you'll grind it typically before you get to the ingredient bins. And then when you get to the ingredient bins, you know how many you have, they're VFD controlled or they're just a single speed control. And then of course, the number of scales in the batching process is a big driving factor.
00:06:34
Speaker
You just kind of keep walking through the process. So then you'd go to pelleting, you know, over there, we talk about grinding. There's also flaking potentially. Then once you're done with the formula through the batching system, you know, you've got your mash. Does that go to pelleting or, you know, does a customer just have straight loadout? And then from the loadout side of it, is there packaging, bagging that you're going to, or direct loadout to a truck or potentially to loadout bins?
00:07:00
Speaker
And a lot of that is just how automated a system can be to where you put in the formula, how much you want and the destination and the operator hit start. And then they more or less walk away. System will produce it and route it and take it right to the load up. And then you have level indicators in there that you can prove things when you do load out. Sometimes you're loading out onto a truck scale.
00:07:23
Speaker
Where that can be verification that you, what you made and you know, what you produced is actually all in the truck just to verify that you don't have any product left over anywhere.
Flexibility and Efficiency in Feed Mills
00:07:33
Speaker
So feed facilities really do run the gamut. You have those that produce a hundred different feed varieties and bags and all these things, you know, integrated ones that do one formula basically and put it in the trucks every time. So the idea of kind of getting it off the shelf solution becomes really impractical once you think about it, doesn't it?
00:07:52
Speaker
It does. It's the flexibility of the bashing system that makes their job easier and helps them be the most efficient they can be. And if you've got real rigid, sometimes you just go to like a, what we refer to sometimes as a set point where it's just you get one through 20 and that's that it can't change the order, which in the industry is not really acceptable on that side because it doesn't give you the flexibility to rotate your ingredients around or things like that.
00:08:20
Speaker
especially since these controls and the solutions can do so much more than they used to be able to now and are so much more, I would argue, needed now than they have been in the past with labor shortages and all these other quality control issues. Can you give us an example of a female that had a successful implementation of one of your control solutions and impact it had on their operations? The biggest piece of that is going to be
00:08:48
Speaker
The transition from a manual feed mill to an automated feed mill is just ultimately the time savings. It's an efficiency thing because the controls will always maximize the use of the equipment. So it'll make the feed as fast as it can mechanically. But at the same time, it's doing that. When you transition to customer, it frees that operator up to where they don't have to be holding buttons and they're not truly as engaged.
00:09:14
Speaker
need to be engaged as much. They're more supervising, so it frees. You could say it would be a reduction in labor. What it does is that I think it repurposes a lot of times the operators to be able to do multitasking then, where before they were pretty much dedicated to standing in front of a control panel. Now they can start a formula, start a batch, and actually do multitasking, do another thing. So it opens that up for the customer to maximize the labor force.
00:09:41
Speaker
Especially because I mean making feed eight hours a day every single day is kind of a tedious monotonous job in the end of it. So I'm sure your employees also appreciate being able to be freed up to do other things, do the things they're best at. Automation takes care of this thing that I don't know. I mean, maybe there are humans that are really great at it, but to me at least sitting there eight hours a day, making sure each formulation goes through correctly.
00:10:07
Speaker
would bore me out of my mind. So I'm sure they welcome the ability to go up and do other things. Yeah, that definitely gives them time to focus on other areas and multitask. Are there any big challenges that come when feed mills start transitioning to an automated solution? And how do you normally overcome those? I don't know. There's any huge transition. It's going to be more of just training, really. I mean, making that transition as smooth as possible. And a lot of times,
00:10:35
Speaker
that transition to an automated system. It kind of starts in the beginning when we do the process flow, we do a proposal, we come to an agreement with a customer. And then from there, we have our internal kickoff meetings and project management meetings. And then when the system's completed, gone through all the approvals of the electrical approval, sequence of operation approvals. Once we've gone through all that at the very end, a big part of that is the FAT test. So we have a factory acceptance test.
00:11:02
Speaker
And that's where we offer the customer to come in and actually put formulas in and simulate running a batch through the system. That's something we offer here. It's drawing free of cost to customers. And with what we learned from COVID, we actually can do that remote now over the different forms and that we try to make that transition as smooth as possible going through actually hands-on operation here before it ever gets in the middle. So that way when you're actually.
00:11:28
Speaker
in the feed mill, if you're already familiar with it, it makes them a lot more comfortable. And then the training even continues on site, even when you're at startup and there's downtime, whether working on equipment or electricians are doing things, you're training operators in that downtime.
00:11:43
Speaker
make that transition smooth. Definitely. And it sounds like you guys do a great job of that. I mean, everyone needs training or you can't expect it to go over smoothly without a bump, without telling people how to do it. Right. So it's great that you guys do that. And especially the like testing method. I've never heard of that. That sounds amazing. And I'm sure a lot of facilities really appreciate that. It takes that edge off of the transition so that, you know, a lot of times operators in the process of
00:12:10
Speaker
automating as the system, the operators are just running the feed mills. So it's typically the plant manager or others start the ball rolling. And then at the end, it's kind of, they get operator input through the process of that. But ultimately in the end, it's getting the operator to see it before they're ever standing in front of it in the feed mill. That deer in the headlights look, what do I do? Especially when you're, you've been doing it the other way for 20, 25 years. And then like, here you go.
00:12:39
Speaker
I mean, I have to ask you this question.
Future Trends in Feed Mill Automation
00:12:41
Speaker
I feel like I lose my podcasting license if I didn't. Are there any emerging trends in feed mill automation and controls that the industry professional should be aware of, especially with you working in so many other industries? You might have some real insight into what's going to be coming into ours in the next couple of years. A lot of it is just people being mobile, being able to operate, you know, old school is you're in a control room and that's where you run in the mill from.
00:13:09
Speaker
So I think a lot of the based on technology changes kind of given the operators the capability to be moving so that a lot of times they can have the applications running on tablets, phones, things like that. So I think that's part of evolving or I think we're right in the middle of that. And it'd be interesting with the emerging trend of AI is becoming, you know, very relevant in the world, but how that fits into the feed mill piece of it, we're still kind of evaluating that that may be more.
00:13:36
Speaker
helpful on being proactive on maintenance and AI think probably could also help with the analytics of the feed mill. You get all that data. It's real hard to break down on your own and make improvements on your own. So you'd think AI would really help with things like that. Because it all comes down to, again, for the feed mill, it's all about tons per hour, tons per day, tons per week. So if you've got a bottleneck somewhere, sometimes you don't see it where I think with all the data collected and with the upcoming AI that
00:14:07
Speaker
can help maximize the efficiency of the mills. So how important is it to work with someone like yourself when implementing a control system like this?
Contact Information and Conclusion
00:14:18
Speaker
Because it seems like you're in position to kind of really help the process along. It all goes back to having the experience in 30 years in the industry. It definitely is a help because it's kind of one of those things where you've been there, done that. So you,
00:14:35
Speaker
You know the questions to ask and sometimes you even challenge a customer. Well, why are you doing it this way? If there's certain areas that you see that potential improvements can always kind of talk through that with the customer. And sometimes it's even on my part, it's good. Like I mentioned earlier, just not challenge the customer, but to ask them why, because again, even with 30 years, I'm learning something every day. So, but the biggest part is the experience, the right questions to ask and just to avoid any headaches in the end.
00:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, if people are interested after listening to this, where can they find out more information about Sterling Systems and you yourself? Definitely visit our website, just launched a new website about a month ago. So definitely it's sterlingcontrols.com. And then feel free to call our office direct at 815-625-0852.
00:15:29
Speaker
and just ask for Dion, or if I'm not available, there's definitely someone that can step in and take your call. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for talking to me, Dion. I hope to have you on again soon. Thank you, Steven. It's been a pleasure. All right. And thank you everyone out there for listening. Until next time, stay safe.