Food & Beverage Manufacturing
To comply with food safety standards, this international food & beverage manufacturer needed to ditch the paper logs and develop a real-time digital tracking system.
One of the world's top food & beverage manufacturers relied on paper logs to track linkage between production and packaging in its manufacturing process, making quality and recall test audits long and often arduous tasks. To help guarantee safety and boost reporting capabilities, F&B leader needed a fully digital, seamless system that could provide insights and results in minutes, not days.
The Problem
The use of paper records for a critical piece of the tracking process prolonged research and investigation time for quarantining and Extent of Impact Determinations (EIDs) in the company's recall test audits.
Taking days to complete and requiring the skills of multifunctional teams from across the company, this lag created a constant struggle to both efficiently investigate quality in real time and comply with food safety test audits.
Our Role
This company engaged RoviSys because of a demonstrated history of success in building MES solutions that implement robust genealogical reporting. This is especially important when complex batch processes meet complex and flexible filling/packaging lines, which can quickly expand variation and detailed tracking requirements.
Substantial expertise in process automation allowed RoviSys to suggest changes to the company’s business processes and control systems instrumentation that simplified process and tracking complications and directly met their needs.
Substantial expertise in process automation allowed RoviSys to suggest changes to the company’s business processes and control systems instrumentation that simplified process and tracking complications and directly met their needs.
The Solution
RoviSys implemented a hybrid Manufacturing Execution System (MES) across both beverage batch processing and packaging, which enabled seamless, real-time product quality tracking against the production order records.
The system allowed the company to perform process and run lot order tracking, enabling systematic management of production in each manufacturing area, plus trace reporting, which provided simple forward and backward genealogy for each batch.
Hundreds of binders of manually-collected log sheets were eliminated from the process and packaging departments. In their place, the new system provided the company with real-time and historical visibility into production records all the way through the manufacturing process.
Also eliminated were the time-consuming manual investigations and reports of product quality that previously had to be cross-referenced against the company's standalone Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS).
The Result
As a result of these efficiency gains, product audit execution times were reduced from days to just minutes, which was more than enough to bring production into compliance for EID audits and investigations. At the same time, audits to identify root causes of problems, which took a week or more to complete with the old system, are now completed in days or hours.
There is also direct impact on both sides of the supply chains. The system matches supplier/raw material quality relationships, allowing the company to reduce batch quality issues even before processing begins. Also, the added visibility provided by the solution gives the company the ability to isolate specific errors, rather than issuing a generalized recall.
A single quality event could cost this company over $25,000 per batch. If the event isn’t detected in time, it could lead to a recall, which would escalate those costs significantly. By providing solutions that constantly monitor and track its manufacturing process all the way from brewing to packaging, this hybrid Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solutions helps prevent costly mistakes before they start.