Vangelis Kapnopoulos – PLC Manager, AS HELLAS
Olympios Petrakis – Software Solutions Manager, AS HELLAS
For more than 30 years, AS Hellas has been at the forefront of the dairy industry, designing and delivering complete production lines for milk and dairy products. Today, it stands as the largest Greek company offering end-to-end solutions for the dairy sector, covering the entire spectrum—from engineering and equipment to automation, digital monitoring, and operational optimization.
Our long-standing expertise is built on an extensive installed base within real-world production facilities that operate daily. This allows us to understand in-depth the specificities of dairy production, its constraints, and—most importantly—the critical points where value is created or lost.
Automation as a Strategic Advantage
At the core of AS Hellas solutions lies advanced industrial automation, designed not merely for equipment control, but as a strategic tool to simplify operations, ensure safety and product quality, and drive overall performance.
Based on modern PLC and SCADA platforms from leading international suppliers, AS Hellas automation solutions focus on stability and scalability. Our programming philosophy emphasizes:
- Significant reduction in manual intervention (in certain cases up to 50%).
- Standardized and validated routines that minimize human error.
- Seamless integration of additional functions, such as energy monitoring and advanced reporting.
Processing & Filling Process
Unlocking Hidden Capacity with AS Analytics – CIP
One of the most critical processes in any dairy plant is Cleaning-In-Place (CIP). While essential for food safety, its actual impact on production capacity is rarely fully quantified. Our data shows that equipment downtime due to CIP often exceeds 10% of total available time.
Through AS Analytics – CIP, we transform raw automation data into actionable insights. The system offers:
- Precise Quantification: Detailed tracking of CIP duration per cleaning target and line.
- Bottleneck Identification: Detection of cycle overlaps and optimized line utilization.
- Capacity Recovery: Identifying opportunities to reclaim lost time without the need for capital-intensive hardware upgrades.
In real-world applications, better organization of CIP operations alone has led to an increase in net productive time of approximately 5–8%.
Quality, Compliance, and Digital Transformation
Beyond productivity, AS Analytics actively supports quality assurance and regulatory compliance. The execution—or non-execution—of required cleaning cycles is automatically recorded, while custom rules and alerts are configured to flag any deviations. Documentation is no longer a manual burden; it becomes an automated byproduct of daily operations.
Furthermore, AS Analytics drives the transition to paperless operations. By digitizing key production and quality forms via intuitive tablet interfaces, manual records are replaced by structured data. The system features auto-population of data fields (such as instrument readings and batch numbers) directly from the production line.
This approach significantly reduces the risk of human error, simplifies archiving and data retrieval, and creates a unified data repository for continuous analysis and improvement.
The AS Hellas Philosophy
Automation delivers true value only when it leads to knowledge and better decision-making. At AS Hellas, decades of dairy industry experience—combined with advanced data analytics—translate into tangible and measurable benefits for our customers.
| For us, technology is not an end in itself; it is the ultimate tool for improving everyday operations and a primary driver of long-term success. |
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