Co-authorship: Helio Luis Pavani, Industrial Director at Colombo Agroindústria

Automation architectures: Colombo Agroindústria, today with three production units in the interior of the state of São Paulo, in the cities of Ariranha, Palestina and Santa Albertina, is in constant search for technological innovation and automation, within its project for Industry 4.0. The safety of your employees and processes are of paramount importance for the prosperity of the business, and automation is the way to make this possible and consolidate this premise.

The automation architectures have been studied by the Group, so that they are standardized with state-of-the-art equipment installed in its processes. With the necessary robustness, they guarantee the agility of the processes, eliminating interruptions. Currently, the Palestine and Santa Albertina units work with a unique Programmable Logic Controller platform, each with its own particularities, with extremely reliable physical equipment and excellent performance.

At the Ariranha unit, investments are being made so that standardization can be completed by the next crop year. Certified industrial networks ensure fluidity and agility in processes, and operator actions become instantaneous. Working in a virtual environment with state-of-the-art servers, the current supervisory systems “take care of the job”, generating a demand for actions for decision-making between the different sectors, all in real time and always seeking the optimization of the entire industrial plant.

In the agricultural sector, it is no different, the machinery acquired by the Group, increasingly technological, is an important tool in the control of greenhouse gas emissions, in ensuring productivity and economy of inputs, always seeking sustainability. It can be said that Colombo presents performance and efficiency KPIs anchored in technology and innovation; with this, with each automated process, we are sure that more variables can be managed, allowing the achievement of the established goals.

Industry 4.0 in the industrial sector: In the industrial sector, process improvements are optimized in real time by software, monitored by industrial operators. Actions in set points and generation of reports are based on predefined assumptions, in order to guarantee higher productions, better results, sustainability and safety at all times.

Historians provide information in an agile way, where it is possible to create tools to analyze different scenarios and act effectively, eliminating process deviations or finding better production scenarios, with smart spreadsheets, generating graphs that can be separated by harvest, or even between shifts, for individual performance analysis , identifying training needs or reviewing procedures, ensuring the Group's continuous improvement.

With Historian Web Admin in the palm of your hand with a tablet , we have all the process information in real time, in addition to being totally possible to analyze the data of all the actions taken by the software or by the operator that preceded a chosen event. Industrial maintenance system: Looking for extremely agile and safe systems, with flexibility of execution via mobility and the possibility of integrating real-time monitoring of assets and also information that adds value and security in decision-making, we arrived at an industrial maintenance system making the investment a strategic ally for the management of the company.

The system is able to store all the information from different sources in an industry to help manage processes and automate the routine of the maintenance sector, in line with the company's sustainable development and goals. Starting in April 2021, the centralization of data, which was previously limited to the various equipment and systems of an industry, now reaches a new scenario. The crossing and historical storage of data offer numerous possibilities for technical interpretation, aiming at the anticipation of trends and helping in decision making.

All this in a systemic way within reach of technicians. Therefore, the possibilities are immense and the opportunities for improvement in management are increasingly evident. The innovations that have been implemented in our activities make processes more constant and consistent, as they raise the limits of process restrictions, always emphasizing the reliability of operations.

These actions ensure that the team is always up-to-date and focused on making the best decision for the process, reducing production costs and creating a safe working environment. The search for better efficiency emerges as a major concern in a market that is increasingly competitive, where there are multiple objectives to meet the multiple markets of sugar, ethanol and bioenergy.