Rockwell Automation and Nestlé join forces to promote industrial engineering in the UK to young people at The Big Bang Fair.
The estimated 35,000 young people making the trip to the NEC in Birmingham between the 15th and 17th of March this year were given the opportunity to learn about food manufacturing, engineering and automation while enjoying live demonstrations of automation in action. Attendees also had the chance to compete with other young people in a unique interactive game at the Nestlé/FDF stand.
Rockwell Automation and Nestlé have benefited from working closely together on automated product lines across the globe for many years on a broad range of household-name products from Nescafé and Quality Street through to the Purina Petcare range. Both companies have active and expanding apprenticeship programmes here in the UK which contributed directly to the stand at The Big Bang 2012.
Plastic model ‘Smarties’ cascaded from a large tube which used nothing but air pressure to propel the light-weight plastic balls and shoot them from the top of the tube. Visitors to the stand were invited to compete in a factory automation simulation game based on the Kit Kat production line. The game tested players’ abilities to manage and understand the automated system by asking them respond to increasingly frequent and complex on-screen instructions to keep the line running safely.
By working as a team to alter a set of industrial controls in front of them, such as an emergency stop mechanism and a settings dial, players ran the automated line directly through the Allen-Bradley ControlLogix Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) from Rockwell Automation. This is just as it happens on the real Kit Kat line at Nestlé’s factory in York.
