Hill’s Pet Nutrition Upgrades Control System to Eliminate I/O Failures and Boost Productivity

In the highly competitive pet‑nutrition industry, maintaining continuous production while reducing downtime is essential. In 2006, Hill’s Pet Nutrition – a company founded over five decades ago by a veterinarian and now selling in 86 countries with sales exceeding $1 billion – faced recurring analog‑input failures at its Kentucky plant. These failures forced manual I/O rack swaps, triggered up to an hour‑and‑a‑half shutdowns on its extruder line, and left the company scrambling for obsolete replacement cards.

Shane Simmons, systems engineer at Hill’s, explained that the plant’s aging controllers were approaching end‑of‑life, and the disparate control platforms across raw‑material, extrusion, and packaging lines were driving up maintenance costs and eroding operator expertise. The company needed a single, future‑proof platform that could be integrated into existing infrastructure with minimal disruption.

Hill’s chose Rockwell Automation’s ControlLogix programmable automation controller (PAC). The ControlLogix’s ability to scan existing I/O cards while communicating with other plant controllers enabled a phased migration that minimized production impact. In early 2008, engineers converted one extruder line by simply swapping I/O modules into the ControlLogix PAC on weekends, then reinserting them into the original system during the week. This approach avoided the six‑month to one‑year downtime that a full rack replacement would have caused.

Standardization was a key benefit. The upgrade paved the way to consolidate the plant’s networking onto a single EtherNet/IP architecture, replacing legacy DeviceNet, Modbus Plus, and Data Highway Plus networks. This simplification will streamline maintenance, improve troubleshooting, and foster plant‑wide integration.

Migration enablers from Rockwell’s PartnerNetwork further accelerated the project. The Automation Network X‑change (AN‑X) module from Quest Technical Solutions replaced an existing I/O scanner, automatically mapping I/O cards to the ControlLogix PAC via Ethernet. The Modbus Plus dual‑port communication module from ProSoft Technologies bridged the existing Modbus Plus network to the ControlLogix backplane, enabling seamless data exchange across 4,000 registers.

Beyond reliability, the ControlLogix PAC’s high‑speed processing allows Hill’s to consolidate two batching line controllers into one, and its RSLogix 5000 programming environment offers tag‑based programming and reusable instruction libraries. These features reduce programming time, lower training costs, and standardize code across the plant, eliminating the need for multiple proprietary scripts.

Hill’s anticipates a 5 % productivity boost from reduced I/O failures and downtime. The migration will span five years, upgrading at least six controllers—including DCS, PLCs, and motion controllers—across all major production lines. The Kentucky plant is now serving as a proving ground for the same technology at Hill’s new Emporia, Kansas facility.

For further details on Rockwell Automation migration solutions, visit Rockwell Automation. Learn more about partner solutions from Quest Technical Solutions (quest) and ProSoft Technology (prosoft).