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Overview
ARC held its second virtual European Industry Forum on May 18th and 19th. As part of the Forum, a session on operations management was held in cooperation with MESA Europe. Representatives from two leading food and beverage producers also spoke about their operations management initiatives. Arla Foods informed the participants about a manufacturing excellence approach supported by manufacturing-oriented intelligence tools, and RCL FOODS about the fast adaptation of the supply chain to the changing demand related to the pandemic. The two presentations were preceded by the MESA keynote about the new needs in project governance related to digital transformation. These presentations were followed by a panel discussion that focused on success factors in the human realm. The session was recorded and is available for replay for three months.
MESA Keynote and Presentations
Chairman of MESA Europe Uwe Kueppers kicked off the session with a presentation about the new needs for governance for smart manufacturing and digitalization. Mr. Kueppers emphasized a human-centric approach and recommended self-directing agile teams to maximize human effectiveness alongside attention for culture and change management. When discussing the business case, Mr. Kueppers mentioned business opportunities and customer benefits, technical aspects such as data governance and IT architecture, optimization of processes, adoption by users, stakeholder engagement, and vision. The human side of projects is not at all a pure cost, but when properly treated it can be a great source of benefits, as enthusiasm and positive moods positively impact adoption and project results. Mr. Kueppers advocated to align projects with vision and culture and optimize business processes before “casting them in software.” His presentation of a mind map of issues that can arise may help project teams to identify issues and underlying root causes. Mr. Kueppers proposed the MESA Smart Manufacturing Roadmap as a collection of components to address the issues. Mr. Kueppers suggested that data is not the oil of the future because sharing it creates added value. MESA can help its members through collaborative work on topics and initiatives that materialize in guidance documents and peer networking.
Arla Foods Dairies Own Their Manufacturing Applications Supported by Central Teams
Mette Marie Løkke from Arla Foods in Denmark presented how her department supports process optimization through manufacturing intelligence in dairies of the cooperative. The activity is part of Arla Foods’ global digitalization strategy 
applied to the supply chain domain. For manufacturing intelligence this includes providing sensors and data generation, data analytics, data visualization, and process control. These elements are built upon automation and IT infrastructures. The team consists of eight experts in data quality, sensor technology and data collection, data visualization, advanced process control, and data analysis. Their work increased the number of sites where statistical process control (SPC) was implemented and underway, each from about a quarter to about a third of the sites. There are other teams supporting the dairies with people, tools, and IT perspectives.
The dairies are very heterogeneous in terms of infrastructure and skills. To make sure their data gets into a common server for analysis, the manufacturing intelligence team collaborated with site IT for process data, global IT for SAP quality data, and site SPC teams for the remaining data that is entered through simple web forms. The data is used to generate SPC control charts to reduce variations, instant traceability, and data mining for trouble shooting, testing hypotheses, and validating recipes. Local SPC teams use the control charts for real-time monitoring, where the central team supports the dairies in researching root causes, pre and postproduction reviews, improving the process and the chart formats. Local dairies can monitor their production from an overall dashboard and drill down to different sections of the process to focus on the main deviations that require immediate attention.
The charts, created in Northwest Analytics Focus EMI and Quality Analyst are very well received by the users, leading to comments such as “We have much data – dashboards are one of the ways of turning data into information,” or “Our experience is that NWA dashboards in combination with a SPC course for the operators give a good common understanding.” This common understanding is important to make sure that individuals and shifts apply the same process and have the same interpretation of the same data.
One type of benefits for a dairy is to have visibility on so-called ‘give-away’ -- the surplus of material filled in a package compared to the nominal amount sold. In one case this led to 30 percent of cost savings with a value of €200,000 per year. Other reported benefits are 10-15 percent product performance improvement and a doubling of the site’s capacity without investment. These benefits are attractive to the dairies that may get motivated to start applying analytics to other aspects of their processes, and these also motivate new dairies to consider implementation. This way the initiative becomes self-propelling and naturally overcomes hurdles related to the understanding of potential, lack of skills or lack of management priority.
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Keywords: ARC European Industry Forum, Manufacturing Operations Management, Manufacturing Intelligence, Supply Chain, Human Resilience, Motivation, ARC Advisory Group.