Creative Improvement
Major Food Manufacturer seeks Tasty Upgrade.
Creative Foods is a major producer of chilled and ambient products such as sandwich fillings, marinades, sauces, mayonnaise, and dips. As part of a multimillion pound redevelopment of the Creative Foods’ Burton-on-Trent site, PlantRun was chosen to monitor the performance of the lines.
Overview
Creative Foods required a system capable of monitoring and presenting key production and downtime data site-wide, to help them identify areas for improvement. Spread across two of the departments, the system monitors twelve production lines across the site such as bottling, bucketing, pouching and plant based area. 
Products are counted by monitoring the start and end of the line with optical sensors. Each product that goes past both sensors results in a good product made and the difference in counts is attributed to the number of rejected products. Production delays are accurately measured, with short stops and reasons for long stoppages captured and processed in realtime. PlantRun’s analysis tools enable targeting for continuous improvement.
Product Tracking
Operators select the product to run on the line, and PlantRun provides shopfloor and management live information such as:
- Number of products being made per minute compared to the target for that product
- Pack count, using a predefined products per pack specific to each selected product
- Reject counts and reasons for rejection
The system has an interlock facility that prevents operators from running the line without logging in and selecting a product. Automatic operator and product log off improves data quality and simplifies the end of shift operator interactions.
A daily Shift Production Overview report is automatically generated and emailed to relevant personnel, giving a historical breakdown of each product ran on each machine and its associated product specific KPIs.
Six large screen TVs are located on the shopfloor and office areas to provide sitewide visibility, and keeps key members of staff informed of live production status. Any real-time information can be displayed as well as custom messaging such as Health & Safety message displays, which were included with the system.
Alerts and Call Outs
Creative Foods’ PlantRun system has been designed to detect if there is a difference in the counts from both sensors on each line, which may be contributed from a sensor fault. Should the system flag a recurring fault over a period of time, the engineering team will automatically be notified via email of which sensor is potentially faulty or out of position.
Call outs can be made directly from each line for a maintenance engineer or team leader. This ensures faster response to breakdowns or stoppages, minimising downtime. Call outs trigger the request on the large screen TV's. Call out response and resolution/repair times are recorded, providing valuable information for maintenance mangement.
Features
- Product Tracking
- Operator Tracking
- Shift Tracking
- Asset Interlock
- Downtime Monitoring
- Scrap Reason Tracking
- Slow Reason Tracking
- Timed Email Reports
- Email Alarms
- Shopfloor Terminals
- Large Screen KPI Displays
- Health & Safety Messaging
