As you are thinking of how to increase your plant capacity, adding new product lines, and diversifying your manufactured food, beverage, dairy, wine, beer, or other alternative food products, you may encounter limitations within the existing plant that requires engineering design and practical installation knowledge from design-build contractor experts. Placer Process can be your contractor partner to evaluate your existing plant capability, review the potential expandability of the existing process, design suitable process and utility systems, propose options to achieve your project goal, and weigh the pros and cons of the options.
In one example, our customer needed expert sanitary design services for the planning and budgeting for the expansion of a fluid milk plant. The customer is planning to meet its projected production demand by adding a new filler and production line along with supporting raw processing equipment and pasteurizer as the kill step to ensure the product is meeting the PMO guidelines and be shelf-stable.
The design needed to carefully consider receiving requirements, batching and holding tanks, as well as clean-in-place system expansion. Placer Process completed a design that optimized the use of existing CIP systems, providing costs for manual and automatic options that addressed the cost versus the operator interaction risk, tolerance, and preference. During this plant expansion design project, a phased installation plan was developed from the view of being a contractor first that gave potential for minimal downtime during the system installation keeping the customer operating and making profit.
This design study has helped confirm the optimum size and quantity of tanks, piping, and other process along with the utility upgrade solutions to minimize operating plant downtime and maximize the reuse of existing equipment. The proposed solution not only optimized the project return but also provided a practical completion timeline and considerations that our in-house process design and installation team were able to provide under Placer Process comprehensive design-build contractor package.
