Industry Case Studies, Food and CPG

Extending Standard Business Processes and Best Practices Across the Enterprise

Background:
A multi-billion dollar division of a leading agribusiness company wanted to introduce technology-supported best practices into its enterprise-wide manufacturing structure. The scope of this project focused on the end-to-end manufacturing operations within the company's United States and Canadian manufacturing plants. These operations included raw material receipt through to finished goods shipping.

Situation:
This subsidiary desired to build a complete, standardized, corporate-wide solution for their manufacturing process to better enable production execution, quality management, and decision support capabilities. Mature manufacturing processes and work processes already in existence allowed for an easy transition. A particular strength of the client was their openness to making changes and improvements in business processes and work practices. They understood the need to focus priorities on the business and process changes for the company. In addition, the client recognized that technology was an enabler, not a "silver bullet" for process changes.

Solution:
EnteGreat's solution was a phased approach, which began by assessing the client's current production execution environment. EnteGreat then developed a current state model, determined plant-floor disconnects, and identified the issues and problems within the client's business model. From that point, the future state requirements were developed. The client chose a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) for the United States and Canadian facilities within the business unit. The key software components of the system were based on the Siemens SIMATIC IT MES suite of software. The software architecture included Production Suite, Historian, Unilab LIMS, and Report Manager (based on Business Objects).

Benefits:
The combination of these software tools provided the needed technology to enable the client's improved business processes in production execution, quality assurance management, data collection, and decision support. The integrated solution provided the client with a central repository for all detailed production and quality assurance information for all products and manufacturing sites within the business unit. Specific improvements realized from this project include the reduction of inadvertent product mixture through better visibility, the reduction of distressed inventory through the establishment of a perpetual inventory process that tracks inventory age and condition, and reduced shrinkage in material handling due to an overall reduction in non-value-added inventory movements. The savings in energy costs include better monitoring and utilization of energy application, recipe optimization to reduce energy consumption, reduced energy used in material handling due to an overall reduction in non-value-added inventory movements, and the ability to measure all indirect energy consumption and reduce non-value activities.