Clover SA (Pty) Ltd

The successful implementation of these standards ensures seamless integration with all stakeholders in the system lifecycle with significant improvements in project and development costs as well as project execution time and commercialisation. Elegant design principles at the visualisation level have a positive impact on training, project hand-over dates and help operational staff react to abnormal conditions quickly.

“When I started with Clover, I made it my business to visit a number of our 14 sites in South Africa and Botswana and discovered something of concern,” says Francois Theron, Engineering Manager: Electrical and Control Systems. “Although Clover has extremely competent and dedicated people who work in the automation space, they worked in complete isolation of one another.”

Theron found that adherence to project and implementation standards varied from absolute to less than perfect and that anything in between was subject to time, money and production-consuming experimental trial and error. This prompted an initiative to define the best possible implementation methodology and standards for Clover’s many projects that would also help the company achieve its business goals.

Doing it right

“If I give someone a block of clay with the instruction to make a model racing car and some time later I’m presented with a clay racing car, what is my recourse if it’s the wrong shape, colour or anything else I had in mind? None.”

According to Theron, the answer to successful project implementation lies with breaking down the task into standard building blocks that, when assembled, will yield the desired result. “The responsibility for the granularity and detail with which I specify how my lump of clay must result in the kind of racing car model I’m looking for lies with me. But after all that, the final product may still need some work.”

Comments have been made that outsourcing software functionality to third parties is simply not possible in industry because processes are so proprietary. “This is the kind of thinking that I want to challenge,” says Theron. “A functional software specification must give the intended result irrespective of who generates it and it starts by defining standard building blocks necessary to achieve that result. It’s through this increased granularity and clarification that we can get the functionality we need.”

By using this standard framework and documentation flow, the project lifecycle now looks like this:

• Requirements definition – The process engineer now has a structure to describe the process in terms familiar to everyone involved.
• Design – Because everyone speaks the same language, the design review phase is that much easier as the standards provide the framework for detailed design and even allow for the inclusion of inputs from multi-disciplinary sources such as quality and control personnel, HAZOP, HACCP and others. “This allows us to do much of the design documentation up-front,” says Theron. “Without this process, we would be locking up our IP in an inaccessible black box. Instead, we now have a document without this IP component and that anyone can interpret.”
• Development – The software engineer now has clear guidance as to the desired result and the requirements that led to it.
• Testing – This is no longer a haphazard affair as what the software engineer delivers can be measured against the documented functional requirements.
• Commissioning – Deploying the solution becomes far more predictable and easier. There are no surprises because all involved are familiar with what was specified and they now see it in practice.

“Some tips and considerations to bear in mind when defining standards include the use international standards wherever possible – we’ve found ISA 106 to be most useful and concise,” says Theron. “Something else to bear in mind is that standards are not static. They need to evolve to incorporate new technologies and modern automation strategies such as Situational Awareness. It’s important to keep two sets of documentation – the design document and the implementation guide which can be given to a system integrator to ensure that your standards are maintained. And lastly, because technology allows us to get lost in details, a guiding principle is to keep things as simple as possible.”

Clover is a leading and competitive branded consumer goods and products group operating in South Africa and other selected African countries with core competencies in the production, distribution and sales of dairy and non-dairy beverage consumer products

Clover delivers product to approximately 14 913 delivery points across South Africa. The Group was converted from a co-operative society into a public company in 2003.

The company is located in Queensburgh and Pinetown in Kwa-Zulu Natal and is a household favourite with its milk products as well as its range of juices (Tropika, Krush and Nectar). Clover also produces Amasi and Super-M flavoured milk.

Clover was voted the most reputable company in South Africa for 2016 and is recognised for the attention paid to the delivery of healthy products.