For chewing-gum manufacturer Adams Cadbury, the Primex Wireless GPS Clock System solved a problem that had plagued the facility for years: an inefficient, unreliable wall clock system that pitted technologies against each other and caused problems with employees’ punctuality due to differences between the time on the walls and their time and attendance system.

The Rockford, Illinois, plant that now bears the Adams Cadbury name has not always made chewing gum exclusively. Formerly part of Warner Lambert and then Pfizer; over the years the plant has produced everything from Listerine, a leading brand of mouthwash to Certs mini-mints. Many of the processes in healthcare and candy manufacturing are the same, however, and the facility has kept pace with both technological and corporate changes.

Today Adams Cadbury in Rockford produces Trident, Dentyne, Bubblicious, and Adams brand “nostalgia” gum (you may recognize Beemans, Blackjack, and Clove gum). In keeping with changes in consumer preferences, the company has purchased new equipment to make the kinds of gum people want to buy. Today machines package the popular “pellet”-style gum. Packaging equipment makes individual bubble packs for retail distribution. And throughout it all, accurate clocks are essential to keep things running on schedule.

Robert “Buck” Cowen has witnessed many changes in his 17 years as an electrical engineer and computer networking support at the plant. The Rockford plant of Adams Cadbury operates out of three main buildings in its 500,000-square-foot facility. The facility relied on an old master clock system with two motor generators that every hour sent out 3510 hertz signals over the electrical power lines to synchronize the clocks. Problems arose when the plant had to disconnect from the main Northern Illinois power grid to just their co-generation source, a 4.5-megawatt turbine that produces power and recovery boiler that re-uses the heat for steam generation.

“We first noticed problems when we were on island mode (the plant was disconnected from the main power grid) Cowen said. “When power was supplied by just the turbine, the clocks saw those harmonics as a signal to synchronize, and the clocks would just spin.”

The maintenance team improvised ways to accommodate this technological incompatibility.

“We had to desensitize the clocks,” he said. “It was a real pain, and it didn’t always work.”

What’s worse, with the arrival of new packaging equipment, the noise-suppression system on the machinery prevented the clocks from receiving signals to synchronize. The plant accommodated for this problem by disconnecting the machinery and synchronizing the clocks on the weekends. This effort required countless employee hours that could have been better spent on more productive plant maintenance tasks. Staff also had to manually change clocks for daylight-savings time twice a year.

“We put up with this for several years, and then I made it my personal mission to find a better solution,” Cowen says.

Cowen investigated purchasing isolation transformers, but the cost was prohibitive—$8,000 to $12,000—and fraught with complications.

“I realized we had to have something that did not require power for distribution and synchronization,” he said. One of the Powerhouse supervisors found information for Primex, and after a visit from the sales representative, “I knew the Primex system would be perfect for us.”

The original building, constructed in 1955, is four stories high. It’s Master Clock system is obsolete, but still works because there is no machinery there that competes with the clocks. Cowen has been integrating the Primex Wireless system into its “B” and “C” buildings, and using the old clocks in the “A” building as spares.

“Every time we add a clock it’s a Primex clock,” Cowen says. “This way we waste nothing. The cost of replacing the older system clocks and buying new Primex clocks is the same.”

“It’s been a wonderful solution for a system that didn’t work well for years,” Cowen says. “It’s inexpensive and runs perfectly, all the time.” We have also purchased a Primex Computer Time Sync that receives the time synchronization and it keeps our data collection in exact time which is very helpful for tracking events and alarms.