- 26:20 min
When Döhler South Africa hit capacity at their existing production facility in 2022, they didn’t patch the problem; they planned for the next decade. The result is a greenfield plant in Paarl built for tenfold growth, and a manufacturing system that’s both powerful and intuitive.
INTEG System Integrators, a South African system integrator and valued member of our community, took on the challenge of designing and deploying a full MES solution on Ignition, and they built something remarkable.
A System That Had to Grow Up Fast
This wasn’t a simple integration. The completed system spans two gateways, over 1.2 million tags, 80 screens, 6,400 alarms, and a batching engine that orchestrates around 200 routes, 2,000 phases, and 400 equipment modules. And it all had to work intuitively for operators on the plant floor.
INTEG’s architecture answer was a hub-and-spoke setup, with each gateway mirroring the plant’s two sections. Ignition’s Perspective module handles the HMI layer, while Tag Historian and the Reporting module sit underneath, capturing everything. Sepasoft’s Batch Procedure Module acts as the batching engine, and Canary Historian rounds out the data layer, a combination of tools we know well and believe in deeply.
Traceability and Control, Built to ISA 88
Food and beverage demand a level of traceability that leaves no room for ambiguity. INTEG built the entire MES to the ISA 88 standard, with a custom ID-generation system that ensures every component, every route, phase, equipment module, and control module carries a unique identifier.
When an operator runs a batch, the system automatically locks associated equipment out of any other process. Nothing proceeds without a quality control sign-off. Nothing runs without a clean-in-place confirmation. It’s the kind of interlocking that builds trust at the operator level and confidence at the management level.
Designed for the People Using It
One of the things that stood out most about this project is how much thought went into the human side of it. South Africa’s linguistic diversity is real. INTEG addressed this head-on by building a symbol-driven interface where visual cues do the heavy lifting, reducing the cognitive load on operators navigating a complex system.
Navigation itself follows a ‘three-click’ rule: any part of the system is reachable in three clicks. A breadcrumb system and integrated alarm acknowledgement keep operators oriented at all times. Dirk Brand noted that operators picked up a complex system far more quickly than expected, and that’s not by accident.
What This Means for Our Community
Projects like this one don’t happen in isolation. Tean Butler, Technical Manager at INTEG, put it simply: any project of this scale will encounter technical difficulties, but they had support every step of the way. We’re proud to have backed INTEG and Döhler through every stage, and even prouder to see this story now recognised on the global Inductive Automation platform.
This is what’s possible when the right team, the right tools, and the right community come together.
Project Overview
- Integrator: INTEG System Integrators
Start Date: Phase 1: December 2023 | Phase 2: May 2024
Tags: 1,200,000+
Screens: 80
Alarms: 6,400
Architecture: Hub & Spoke
Tech Stack: Ignition (Perspective, Tag Historian, Reporting) + Sepasoft Batch Procedure Module + Canary Historian