New system gives Carlsberg a bird's eye view of processes
Carlsberg UK has installed a manufacturing execution system (MES) providing greater visibility and a fuller overview of production processes in partnership with Siemens and Automation Tooling Systems (ATS).
The initiative took two years to implement at a pilot manufacturing site in Northampton, where the brewer handles up to 100,000 bottles or cans per hour. The company is now investing euro 6M in rolling the MES out to 15 plants across Europe. The entire process is scheduled for completion in the middle of 2010.
"We had an additional spend of £50,000 at Northampton to interface the pallet labellers and for some industrial workstations," said Jez Harris, group business process manager, production, for Carlsberg.
The system gave production planners "instant insight into the execution of orders on filling lines", according to Paul Bron of ATS International. He was outlining the work involved at a presentation at Siemens' offices in Frimley, Surrey. Managers could access the system remotely to reveal real time, continuously refreshable data covering everything from start times and volumes filled to order deadlines. The MES also automatically generated batch numbers for pallet labels, dramatically reducing labelling errors made in manual processes.
The MES could form reports on aspects such as speed losses and the top 10 reasons for production downtime per shift. It could also distinguish scheduled downtime from 'own downtime', caused by Carlsberg's own equipment or personnel, and 'foreign downtime', caused by late delivery of raw materials for example.
"Previously it had to spend 45 minutes to get this information now it is readily available," said Bron. Numbers could also be readily exported to spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel.
The project enabled Carlsberg to consolidate production methods from different breweries to establish best practice in areas such as key performance indicators and quality control. Optimising stock levels was another priority, said Bron.
