Within the food industry, Groupe Danone is widely recognised for the dynamism and strength of its brands. Through its three core businesses fresh dairy products, beverages, and cereal biscuits and snacks the company often leads the way in setting trends in consumer tastes.
For example, it was among the first to recognise the need for a wider variety of healthy, easy to consume any time, any place foods.
Today, the company is number one worldwide in fresh dairy products and packaged water and number two worldwide in biscuits and cereal snacks. It is also the number one dairy manufacturer in Spain, producing many of the best known brands.
In the yogurt segment alone, such household names as Vitalinea, Yoghourt Griego, Bio, Yoghourt Natural and the probiotic drink Actimel immediately come to mind.
The solution that was initially implemented to cover plant information and key performance indicator (KPI) management of the filling lines was so successful that Danone Spain decided to turn to Siemens Servicios Industriales, the Simatic IT certified partner, once more for help. The company needed a seamless integration of Themis, the Danone worldwide ERP system, with the different systems used at plants in Parets del Vallès and Aldaia.
The business and IT challenge
The backbone of Danone's worldwide presence and leading position is its ability to adjust quickly and successfully to changes in business environments.
Themis, the group-wide SAP version, was launched in 2001 to enhance this level of responsiveness. By improving the information flow and simplifying and harmonising operating processes in all business functions, Themis enhances the effectiveness of operations worldwide.
For Danone Spain, Themis highlighted the need to optimise existing production processes and data flows and ensure high-level integration and communication between management and production.
A standardised solution to these requirements was needed; one allowing for future growth and improvements and including the capability to rollout to the other plants of the group with minimal additional effort.
The plants in Parets and Aldaia required an MES system for the filling lines that would end the paper-based maintenance and distribution of plant data that was causing waste, errors and delays and resulted in poor KPIs.
A tighter integration between different processes and systems was needed to avoid the same information having to be manually introduced and processed within different plant systems.
What Danone wanted were tools and solutions that could manage production processes and synchronise the ERP-defined product and production requirements with the plant capabilities. It also wanted to gain real-time visibility of production processes to avoid high costs and to improve forward scheduling and resource utilisation.
New production lines at the greenfield plant in Aldaia were planned that would have their own functionality. What was needed was a standard and parameter-based solution that could be easily rolled out to other plants quickly and without reengineering.
An MES solution
In the first phase, Simatic IT was introduced to address the need for a management system in the filling lines. This required monitoring of the plant area, data acquisition and KPIs, production order management, batch management, operator management, maintenance operations management and quality data acquisition, among others.
In the second phase, it was implemented as the data integration platform between Themis (SAP) and the three main plant areas: processing, filling and packaging, and incubation.
The production data flow from the entire production line to SAP is handled now by Simatic IT. The interaction basically consists of four interfaces.
Once a day all product-related master data, such as product data, BOM, and production data, are downloaded from ERP to MES, which then distributes these data to the rest of the plant systems.
Production orders are also downloaded from ERP to all the plant systems through Simatic IT once a day. The order status is uploaded in real time from MES to SAP.
Every time the status of an order changes in the filling lines, ERP receives a message from MES with information about performance and order times. An Inbound order confirmation takes place for every pallet that is produced, which consists of an online message from MES to SAP with relevant information about this pallet.
Better integration
This implementation at Danone is a clear demonstration that the new approach of MES resulted in savings and better integration of earlier IT investments.
Simatic IT follows the ISA-95 international standard, guaranteeing future-proof technology. It combines a stable, standard product with the capability to adapt it to specific manufacturing processes at other Danone plants.
This is due in part to the use of libraries that allow storing of functionality and plant models for later deployment.
So it combines the advantages of a standard product with those of a tailored solution, perfectly capable of addressing all of Danone's particular quality and production issues.
It now serves as the platform coordinating and modelling the production processes of the different Danone plants. Its integration capabilities cover the entire plant, from the automation level up to the ERP level, delivering the functionality required for optimised production management and control.
Starting from the automation level of the plant, it collects the relevant field data in real time and archives them for later analysis. Continuous monitoring of KPIs increases responsiveness to any event, resulting in improved overall process management.
The integration with the ERP level, which was realised through Simatic IT Server, allows continuous and transparent information flow between the different plant systems and SAP. Simatic IT covers the MES level at Danone Spain, acting as the single interface communicator between the enterprise-wide business system SAP, where high-level decisions on production are taken, and the production process. But it also offers the functionality to provide flawless collection, management and presentation of appropriate data, all according to Danone specifications.
Top-down visibility
Overall the technology offers top-down visibility within the Danone plants and production process, allowing the full configuration of tracking and tracing functions with its built-in capability for upstream or downstream product genealogy.
This function allows tracking of which batches were used for a specific product and which end products result from a specific batch.
In case of a product recall, the product genealogy helps to identify risks and reach timely decisions on appropriate actions to limit damage and liability.
The automation of the information flow results in an optimised availability of production information, from production management to plant systems and vice versa. The results and KPIs from production data collection are now available online.
The automatic real time data integration between the plant systems ensures top-down plant visibility. The automatic quality data acquisition and maintenance management puts Danone in a particularly strong position in terms of regulatory compliance requirements.
Flexible solution
The Simatic IT solution proved to be so flexible that the redesigned and modified concepts and data flows from the existing plants can be implemented in new production lines as well. Now, required functionality is covered with only minimal additional reconfiguration.
Since the go-live date, the project has been extended due to the implementation of new production lines in the Danone plants and new functional requirements resulting from changes in information flows and management within Danone.
It has armed Danone Spain with the capabilities it needs to face future challenges, consumer requirements and changing regulatory standards (Table 1). Productivity of modern filling machines isn't measured by throughput alone.
Today, other factors also play an equally important role, including flexible and efficient order handling, the optimisation of downtime, and improved use of warehouse capacities.
All of these, in fact, describe the functions of a filling management system linked to the state-of-the-art Simatic IT MES.
With the completion of the Simatic IT reports and the adaptation of the filling lines system to the new SAP criteria, the Danone Spain Parets and Aldaia plants are ready for any new regulations and future growth.
Matt Holland is the MES UK Manager at Siemens. For more information, visit www.siemens-industry.co.uk
