Malt producers form part of a complex, high-volume supply chain that starts with wide raw material variances yet ends with consumers who have virtually zero tolerance for variances in quality.
It is also a supply chain that relies on efficiency for profitability and quality realtime information for effective management decision support.
A leading South African malt producer has become a model for malt production by keeping its finger on the pulse of efficiency and profitability with new MIS initiatives The plant needed to upgrade and expand its production facilities to cope with demand while getting better and tighter control of production processes and their profitability. Other objectives included the management of the Gauteng factory from the Western Cape as well as the upgrading of the instrumentation and scada systems to support the company's updated and revised information needs. The plant was also looking for significant improvements on quality, process and production management as well as information delivery.
As it was part of the company's corporate strategy to use Wonderware scada solutions, because of their ability to deliver real-time information to desktops, InTouch, InTrack and InSQL would form the core solutions for the implementation of the management information system. Wonderware's market share and its alliance with, and support of, Microsoft technologies and approaches were also important considerations. As for the system implementer, CS System Solutions was chosen because of its knowledge of Wonderware solutions and its successful track record of tackling large projects of this nature in the manufacturing arena. CS System Solutions won the Wonderware X-Change 2001 award in the category of Best FactorySuite Implementation for their installation at this plant.
"There were some clearly identified objectives for the stock system," says Danny Naidoo, Director, CS System Solutions. "These included the provision of reliable data on barley and malt stocks at the Western Cape plant, minimising stock data re-entry, simplifying the barley and malt recon processes as well as providing process traceability. Needless to say, the system also had to be intuitive and easy to use.
In order to achieve this, it was decided to leverage the information available from the InTouch supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) installation by capturing data at the source. This would allow for full traceability of products and for the modelling of the entire production facility in order to create a foundation for future expansion and integration."
This plant now has a bottoms-up realtime information system that accurately reflects reality and allows operators and managers alike to make informed decisions in realtime. This is of important strategic value in a continuous process plant where things are not always as predictable as in a discrete manufacturing environment. In addition to realising all its business objectives, the plant also now has a system that is ready for expansion and integration with other applications.
"This last point is becoming increasingly important as manufacturers try to unify their companies by linking their wealth-creating operational processes to their business processes," says Mike le Plastrier, MD of Futuristix-Wonderware. "Such a plant-centric approach means that decision makers will have access to a seamless information base that reflects reality in realtime and that can even provide them with web-enabled control over their own processes if required."
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