As an integrated project partner, OAS provided the entire range of services from plant engineering and project planning to the installation and commissioning of the finished processing plant. We were able to provide our entire expertise in the fields of weighing technology, plant engineering and production control during the realisation of the project.
The plant is divided into two production areas. The first area is used to transport, crush and fractionate the raw material extracted from the quarry into various grain classes. In the second part of the plant, the fractionated limestone sand is then either filled or loaded directly or, if required, refined with further additives and bagged. The transport quantities of the filling plant can be flexibly varied from a silo train weighing several tonnes to individual bagging. The entire system is controlled and monitored using our pronto process control system. The recipe management system integrated in pronto enables agile production for a variety of different end products.
"On the one hand, we now use the system to fill our own products, but we are also a hub for platform products and, as an external manufacturer, we can customise the process steps to customer recipes at any time," says Ebeling. This flexibility allows Stricker & Weiken to offer batch sizes as a contract manufacturer that would not be economically feasible for the customer to produce themselves. In this way, the company can be economically successful even with small quantities of its raw material and achieve high-margin sales even in niche areas. This allows a significantly higher added value of its limestone raw material and led to the plant becoming profitable much earlier than expected. "We had only expected Plant II to break even after five years. However, we were already in the black after just two years."
