Otafuku: Chilled Water Plant Control for Sauce Manufacturing

About the project

Otafuku is a Japanese manufacturer best known for its okonomiyaki and savoury sauces, with production in Malaysia. A sauce plant is a cooling-dependent operation: process cooling for production and storage, plus comfort cooling for the people running it, all served by a central chilled water plant. Cobler delivered the BMS controls for that plant.

The challenge

In food manufacturing, cooling is neither optional nor cheap. The chilled water plant runs long hours to hold process and space conditions, and like most plants the simplest way to run it is to leave capacity on. That is also the most wasteful. A plant's efficiency, measured as kW/RT (the power spent per tonne of cooling), depends on running only the chillers, pumps and cooling towers the load actually needs. Japanese manufacturers tend to hold a high bar for exactly that kind of disciplined, measured operation.

The solution

Cobler designed and delivered the building automation and BMS for the plant, controlling the chillers, pumps and cooling towers as one coordinated system rather than independent machines.

- Chillers are staged to the plant's real cooling demand, kept near their efficient operating points instead of running spare capacity.
- Chilled-water and condenser-water pumping and cooling-tower output track the load, holding a good delta-T so the auxiliaries are not overworked.
- CobiNeural monitors the plant and holds the kW/RT efficiency live, giving the team a continuous, measured view of how the plant is performing.

The result

The plant runs to demand instead of flat out, holding its efficiency across the production day. For a manufacturer where cooling is part of the process, that is a lower, more predictable operating cost and a plant the team can see and trust.

See how the same control approach works on other plants in our case studies, or talk to us about chilled water plant control for your facility.