The company produces tomato-based pizza, pasta, salsa, BBQ and other sauces and the MES is deployed with Aptean’s Ross ERP to analyse performance data.
In-depth reports on the performance of the factory
Ryan Swain, IT director, Paradise Tomato Kitchens, told FoodProductionDaily, instead of management driving down the initiative from the top, it involved the plant floor operators from the beginning, getting their input on downtime events.
“The system delivers real time OEE feedback to the operators and supervisors to achieve higher performance, as opposed to analysing data afterwards and hoping to do better next time,” he said.
“It provides Paradise with in-depth reports on the performance of the factory floor, delivers daily performance reviews on developing operator skills and the historical data helps us to identify and quantify obstacles to efficiency and drive continuous improvement.”
Aptean, based in Atlanta, whose clients include Histon Sweet Spreads (Hain Daniels Group) and the Intersnack Group, Europe, also deploys Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Case Management software.
Swain said from an IT perspective, a future game changer is full integration of the supply chain.
Customers are asking for more data to be shared
“At an increasing rate customers are asking for more data to be shared, and internally we require more data of our vendors,” he added.
“The challenge lies in sharing this data in a secure and timely manner and delivering it in way that’s meaningful.
“It’s easy to swamp each other with raw data, but to deliver consistently meaningful business intelligence requires fully integrated internal systems as well as adherence to standards so that the data can be shared securely and in a format that’s easily analysed.
“At the present the demand is outpacing supply as companies roll out requirements and race to ingest large quantities of data without the processes and systems in place to really use that data to manage the business.”
According to Swain, if you’re not making product, you’re not making money.
“The real time data and analytics help us identify the most impactful causes of downtime and correct them, driving out downtime and driving up efficiency,” he said.
“We’ve already uncovered some surprises and low hanging fruit. The frequent small stoppages that are easily and inexpensively corrected often add up to more downtime or slow time than the bigger headline outages that everyone is focused on.
“We’ve made some significant gains in changeover time and more frequent 1-10 minute interruptions that had previously flown under the radar.”