Case Study: Danish Crown

Executive Summary

With the Holsted project as a stepping stone Danish Crown and Xcelgo have developed Experior components that fit Danish Crown hardware. Danish Crown are now able to maintain the catalog, build Digital Twins and perform virtual commissioning themselves – improving control software quality and reducing commissioning time.

Challenges

The Danish Crown group is a global meat processing company and among the largest in its field.

In 2014 Danish Crown opened the most modern cattle slaughterhouse In Europe for business. Located in Holsted, Denmark, the factory has 330 employees and receive 4,500 animals for slaughter a week. That is about half the weekly cattle slaughterings in Denmark.

For such a major project, Danish Crown needed the best emulation testing possible. Before building the factory in Holsted, Danish Crown had used AutoMod for emulation for years, but the Holsted project became the stepping stone for replacing AutoMod with Xcelgo’s software platform Experior.

Solution

For the Holsted project Xcelgo developed a series of models to test the PLCs and IT systems.

The models compressed the majority of the automated system and especially the complex parts after the slaughter chain. Among other things this included several areas with hanging conveyors, case and tote conveyors, and conveyor lines with individual pieces of meat.

Based on their very positive experiences with Xcelgo’s software platform Experior, Danish Crown subsequently took over the maintenance of the models and even chose to develop their own virtual catalog of components that fit Danish Crown’s hardware and procedures.

With this catalog, Danish Crown own technical staff are now able to easily build Digital Twins of new installations and perform virtual commissioning.

Benefits

By performing virtual commissioning Danish Crown ensures control software of the highest quality and a faster commissioning phase. Also Danish Crown are now cable of maintaining and developing catalogs and models on their own. For instance Danish Crown has recently build Experior models for IT testing projects at their facilities in Husum Germany and Bugle UK.

Customer