Conveyor Controls Engineering

• PLC and drive logic — zone control, accumulation, merges, diverts and transfers; VFD configuration and tuning on Allen-Bradley and Siemens platforms.
• Sortation controls — divert logic, scanner and photo-eye integration, reject and recirculation handling, throughput tuning.
• Control panels — designed and built in Mexico, from motor control and VFD packages to the remote I/O enclosures along the line.
• Networks — EtherNet/IP and PROFINET architecture along a long line, where a scan-rate problem looks exactly like a mechanical one until someone who has seen both looks at it.
• Upstream interfaces — the handshake with the warehouse control system, where most throughput problems actually live.
• Installation packages — wire lists, termination schedules, conduit and cable tray routing, and the as-built drawings at turnover.

Safety is where a conveyor controls scope earns its keep. Emergency stops, pull cords, guard and door interlocks, and the zero-energy states maintenance depends on are designed as safety functions — not added as wiring afterwards.

We work to ISO 12100 for risk assessment and ISO 13849-1 for the performance level of each safety function, with the electrical design to NEC and NFPA 70E in the United States and NOM-001-SEDE in Mexico. Panels are built to UL 508A requirements with UL-listed components. We are not a UL 508A listed shop, and where a project needs a listed assembly the route is a field evaluation per panel.

In Mexico, we install. Control and network wiring, terminations and device mounting are done by our own technicians or by subcontractors working under our supervision, to NOM-001-SEDE, and checked point to point by the engineers who wrote the logic.

In the United States, field installation is performed by a licensed electrical contractor. Our scope there is everything around it: the engineering, the panels, the installation drawings and wire lists, on-site supervision and coordination with the contractor, and the checkout and commissioning once the line is wired.

Either way, the package that reaches the installer is the same one the commissioning engineer will work from — and that is the point. A conveyor start-up that slips usually slips on a termination that does not match the drawing.

A new line in an empty building is a commissioning exercise. A retrofit in a distribution center that ships every night is a different job: a fixed access window, the rest of the building in production, and a tie-in to conveyance somebody else owns.

We plan around the operating window from the first schedule, phase the cutover so the building can run overnight on whatever state the work is left in, and prove each change before the next window opens. I/O checkout, functional testing and rate testing are documented against the design, not remembered.

We take the scope — controls design, code, panels and commissioning, owned and signed for.

We staff yours — our engineers embedded in an integrator's or OEM's program, executing to the prime's design and standards while the prime holds the contract.

We name which one is on the table before anyone signs.