Ethernet in the food industry: Meggle.

Experience, quality and success characterises Meggle, a company that can look back over more than a hundred years of history.
Founded in 1887 as a small dairy in Wasserburg near Munich, today the company is international and one of the largest and best-known producers of milk products in Europe. World-wide the company employs more than 1400 employees.
The product range includes butter specialties for food retailing, individual solutions for the catering market, dried milk products for the food industry, as well as lactose products for the pharmaceutical industry.
Meggle Alpenbutter is produced daily using traditional processes and immediately freshly packed. At the start it is milk. However only the best of the milk, the cream, can be used for butter. For this reason the cream is separated from the milk by spinning (centrifuging). Short, careful heating (pasteurising) ensures that the cream is absolutely free of germs, after cooling the cream is ripened/ aged for approx. 16 hours. Using a timetemperature program, the cream is subjected to rest, heating and cooling phases during this period. This process improves the spreading properties and texture of the butter.
Even with that much technology, the butter still remains a purely natural product.

Project parameters:

• Meggle group turnover: more than € 500 million in the corporate group
• Connection of the manufacturing process via a redundant network

Requirements

• Fault tolerance
• Expandability
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Fast Ethernet
• Multimode links

Solution

• Network topology:
  – Backbone MACH 3000
  – Redundant link with Gigabit Ethernet
• Network physical size: connection of four manufacturing plants using multimode optical fibers
• Devices used:
  – 4 Gigabit Ethernet Switches MACH 3002
  – 6 Ethernet Rail Switches RS2 FX/FX
• Service provided: network planning

Why Hirschmann™?

• Redundancy concept with HIPER-Ring
• Homogeneous product family
• Industrial standard products