Success story: automating a bottling line with TIA Portal in the food & beverage sector

The starting point: a fast but opaque line

The client is a bottling company in the food & beverage sector that fills and labels liquid product in bottle format. On paper the line had plenty of capacity, but in practice it never hit its production targets for one recurring reason: constant micro-stops that nobody could explain. Each machine —rinser, filler, capper, labeller, case packer and palletiser— had its own control, its own logic and its own pushbutton station, and none of them talked to the others.

The result was the usual one in installations that have grown by accumulation: when the labeller jammed, the filler kept filling until it flooded the conveyor; when caps ran out, the whole line stopped with no record of the reason; and the shift only found out the line "was running badly" by looking at the case counter at the end of the day. There was no reliable data on why time was being lost, so there was no way to attack it either.

The brief was clear: unify the control of the entire line under a single platform, make the real cause of every stop visible, and be able to prove the improvement with numbers. We chose to do it on Siemens TIA Portal, for the reasons set out below.

Why TIA Portal and an S7-1500 as the brain of the line

When the goal is to integrate several heterogeneous machines into a coordinated line, the control platform matters as much as the logic programmed on top of it. We chose an S7-1500 as the line controller because it gave us computing headroom for synchronisation, traceability and OEE without falling short in the medium term. The comparison we already published between the S7-1200 and the S7-1500 sums up the reasoning well: for a standalone machine an S7-1200 is more than enough, but for the master controller of a line with dozens of axes, communications and real-time KPIs, the S7-1500 is the sensible choice.

TIA Portal also provided the integrated framework the project needed:

• A single environment for PLC, HMI/SCADA and safety. The S7-1500 logic, the WinCC Unified visualisation and the safety side all live in the same project, with the same variables, without exporting or synchronising tags between separate tools.
• A widely supported Siemens ecosystem in the sector, which makes long-term maintenance and the availability of spare parts and skilled staff much easier.
• Scalable communications over Profinet, the backbone of the line (see below).
• Integration with the electrical design. The new cabinet was documented in Eplan and we transferred the signal structure into TIA Portal following the flow we describe in integrating Eplan with TIA Portal via AML, avoiding typing errors and cutting commissioning time.

This "one line brain on Siemens" approach is the same one we used to solve other projects, such as the Siemens control cabinet in Valencia or the motion control on a flying-shear cutting line. The process changes, but the coordinated-control architecture repeats.

Line architecture: Profinet as the backbone

The first step was to replace the mix of buses and point-to-point wiring with a single, deterministic fieldbus. The whole line level was built on Profinet, connecting the S7-1500 to the ET 200SP distributed I/O of each machine, the conveyor drives, the operator panels and the safety devices. Where an older machine only spoke Profibus, we kept a gateway rather than replacing the equipment; the criterion for when to migrate and when to coexist is the one we detail in Profinet vs Profibus.

I/O was brought to ET 200SP terminals distributed along the line, instead of pulling hundreds of cables back to a central cabinet. That simplified the wiring, shrank the cabinet and, above all, left a modular architecture: adding a machine or a station means adding a node to the network, not rebuilding the cabinet. On top of this physical layer we built three logic blocks that are, in fact, the heart of the project: synchronisation, safety and traceability.

Machine synchronisation: the end of micro-stops

The underlying problem was not the speed of any single machine, but their lack of coordination. The solution was to implement in the S7-1500 the line-level logic that the individual machines could not have because they do not see the whole:

• Zone accumulation management. The controller knows how full each conveyor section is and regulates the speed of each machine to keep a stable buffer, instead of starting and stopping abruptly.
• Cascaded start and stop. When a downstream machine stops, the upstream ones slow down and stop in an orderly way before flooding the conveyor, avoiding jams and spilled product.
• Real process interlocks. No filling without caps available, no labelling without a bottle detected, no case packing without a correct count. The logic lives in one place and is consistent across the whole line.
• Centralised speed setpoints per product format, instead of adjusting each machine by hand at every changeover.

The combined effect was drastic: the micro-stops that used to chain together with no record became isolated events, identified and mostly prevented. The line stopped "fighting itself".

Integrated safety with PROFIsafe

A packaging line has guards, emergency stops, light curtains and access zones that must comply with machinery safety regulations. Instead of a separate, hard-wired safety system, we integrated the safety function into the control itself using an F-CPU and PROFIsafe over the same Profinet network. This enables safe stops by zone —stopping only the affected station and not the whole line—, controlled resets and safety diagnostics visible from the same SCADA. How this technology works (F-CPU, PROFIsafe, SIL and PL levels) is explained in our Siemens S7-1500 Safety fail-safe PLC guide.

The practical benefit for the client is twofold: it meets regulations with much simpler wiring and, because safety is integrated, every e-stop trip or guard opening is recorded as one more event, with its time and zone, feeding the stop analysis.

Batch traceability: a food & beverage requirement

In food & beverage, traceability is not an extra, it is an obligation. For any product leaving the end of the line, the system had to be able to answer which batch it belongs to, with what parameters it was filled, and in which time window it was produced. On the S7-1500 we implemented:

• Batch and format management tied to each production order, carrying the identifier along the whole line.
• Logging of relevant process parameters (fill volumes, rejects, counts per station) stamped with time and batch.
• Reject management with cause, so a rejected bottle is counted with its reason (missing cap, wrong level, defective label) and not as anonymous scrap.
• Readiness to link with higher-level systems (MES/ERP) via OPC UA, for when the client moves to plant integration.

The upshot is that in a quality incident the affected product can be narrowed down to a specific batch and time slot, instead of blocking whole days of production as a precaution.

Visualisation with WinCC Unified and real-time OEE

All this information needs a visible face for the operator and for production. We built it with WinCC Unified, the web visualisation platform in TIA Portal, served to Unified Comfort panels on the line and to a browser for managers. If you are unsure what an operator panel is and how to choose it, we cover it in what an HMI is and how to choose the right panel.

The piece that added the most value was the real-time OEE calculation straight from the control. Because the line logic lives in the PLC, we already had in variables everything needed to break losses down into their three classic factors:

For the first time, the shift saw on screen not just how many cases it had made, but what each lost OEE point was due to, sorted by cause. That shift —from "the line is running badly" to "today we lost 40 minutes to jams on the labeller"— is what allows maintenance and improvements to be prioritised. It is the same actionable-data approach we applied in the Grafana OEE dashboard success story, here solved natively inside the Siemens ecosystem.

Commissioning and a phased migration

A food production line cannot be stopped for a week. We worked in phases, using planned shutdowns and weekends, with the new architecture coexisting with the existing one until the final switchover. This progressive-migration approach —testing each block, keeping a way back and not cutting over until validated— is the same one we follow when modernising old controllers, as we describe in the migration from an S7-300 to an S7-1500. Training for line and maintenance staff was done on the real system during commissioning itself, not as a separate course.

Results

• +18% line availability in the first quarter, by eliminating most of the micro-stops caused by lack of coordination.
• Measurable OEE broken down by cause, visible in real time to the shift and to production, as a basis for continuous improvement.
• Full batch traceability, with the ability to narrow any quality incident down to a batch and time slot.
• Integrated, zoned safety that meets regulations and reduces total line stops compared with the previous hard-wired system.
• A modular, documented architecture, ready to grow and to link with MES/ERP whenever the client decides.

How we approach these projects at Bluemation

At Bluemation we design, program and integrate complete lines on TIA Portal and other platforms, with one constant principle: that the client understands and owns their installation. On a project like this we handle the full cycle:

• Analysis of the existing line and of the real causes of loss before touching anything.
• Design of the control and communications architecture, including the Profinet network and the safety side.
• Structured, documented programming of the S7-1500, with reusable libraries per machine type.
• Development of the WinCC Unified visualisation and the OEE calculation, designed for the people on the line every shift.
• Phased commissioning, fine-tuning and training of the staff.
• Support and evolution of the system throughout its service life.

If you have a line that produces below its capacity and you do not know exactly why, or you want to unify heterogeneous machines under coordinated control, check out our PLC programming service, see how we handle supervision and SCADA, or get in touch with us. We analyse your installation with no commitment and propose a roadmap tailored to the equipment you already have.