Factory-wide reporting system cuts manual input

Ryvita required a fast, flexible factory-wide reporting system that would overcome the major obstacle to production of manual data entry.

Citect systems integrator Silchester Control Systems has achieved a 90% reduction in manual inputs across the production system at Ryvita in Poole, providing major improvements in efficiency, accuracy, transparency in reporting using Citect's Ampla MES software.

The Ampla system is the backbone of a flexible factory-wide reporting system, integrating both CitectScada and Citect Reports, which was installed by Silchester together with Citect Professional Services with zero downtime and no loss of production.

It collates vast amounts of data seamlessly, providing easily accessible real time and historical production data to aid immediate decision making and drive continuous business improvement.

According to Mark Chesworth, Supply Chain Director for Ryvita: "This is a major step forward in terms of information accessibility for the site".

"It allows live data to be used by the teams in the factory to drive and improve business performance, without time being wasted trying to collate vast quantities of information".

"It also enables the teams to assume real time responsibility for driving their key performance indicators (KPIs) and to witness the results of their efforts".

"We believe this evolution will prove to be truly empowering for our production staff".

Ryvita, which is part of the Associated British Foods Group, has been making crispbread since 1925, and currently exports to over 85 countries.

Over the last few years, the company's programme of TQM (total quality management) and best practice management has produced a new outlook to manufacturing; delivering many new products.

However, to drive further improvements Ryvita required a fast, flexible factory-wide reporting system that would overcome the major obstacle to production of manual data entry, and provide effective and easily assimilable data regarding system efficiencies, downtime and product tracking.

Citect systems integrator Silchester Controls was contracted to provide the system together with Citect Professional Services.

Although technical expertise was a key to success, the services team also successfully managed change across the business that was impacted by the increase in technology by modelling work flow, focused training and consistent support.

Both Citect Professional Services and Silchester strived to assist the business with identifying improvement possibilities utilising their new technologies.

Trevor Jones, Managing Director, Silchester, takes up the story: "The major bottleneck to improved production efficiency was the requirement for each shift to provide manual entries to a Microsoft Excel legacy reports spreadsheet that was the crux of all production operations".

"The spreadsheet totalled over 40Mbyte and involved thousands of individual calculations from hundreds of manual entries, which took many hours a week to input".

"Moreover, as the inputs were all manual they could become subjective and inaccurate, resulting in production bottlenecks that were difficult to rectify".

The answer to this problem was to provide automatic inputs from sensors across the factory, through the installed base of Schneider PLCs into supervisory computers, and out across the network as useful knowledge.

To acquire the data automatically, a Scada system was required.

Silchester recommended a CitectScada system, not only because its reliability and capability for future expansion, but also because Citect is part of the Schneider Alliance, a factor that greatly simplified the task of interfacing to the installed PLCs.

The CitectScada was installed on several servers, and a number of industrial touch-screen client PCs were connected as clients, their Scada displays being built up as the machine information was connected.

Sitting atop the CitectScada system performing the tasks of collecting, collating and analysing data from multiple input sources, and providing high level reporting, is Citect's Ampla MES system.

Ampla is a scalable suite of MES solutions that delivers real-time access to aggregated plant and business intelligence.

The system allows key personnel to analyse and act on opportunities to refine the workflow, maximise overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and to correct problems before they impact the business.

The combined Scada/MES system was installed by Silchester and Citect with no loss of production or downtime; and the benefits of the new system were obvious from day 1.

Immediate savings were found by Ryvita production teams as previously held beliefs were nullified and actual bottleneck problems were targeted and rectified.

The manual entry that took many hours per week to accomplish was reduced to just a few short minutes per shift.

Moreover the accuracy of the data input is now unquestioned, and repeatability is sustainable.

The success of the installation means that shift team meetings can now project trends and real-time reports to their teams to show problems and identify best practices.

Furthermore, as each new report becomes openly available the shift teams and production managers can easily see what is happening to the end product as minor changes in process are implemented.

Any downtime becomes instantly visible to anyone logged onto the Ryvita network, using only a web browser, and this remote network access now ensures minimal time to fix culture for engineering teams.

The reports provided by Ampla are available network-wide, the very moment the record entries are completed, using only Microsoft Internet Explorer.

In addition, slice and dice reporting of shift/product/line/machine/day data can be achieved using both the Citect Ampla Analyst and the power of Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence Reporting Studio.

In addition, custom tabular, pareto, trend, pie charts and reports are available, customised per user in clearly understandable dashboards, and linkable to Microsoft Dynamics NAV data.

Importantly, the technology and data transport of this production management system is hidden to the end user, who only needs straightforward, timely information in order to make business decisions in a timely manner.

Commenting on what is the first installation of the Ampla MES system in Great Britain, Paul Hurst, Managing Director of Citect, says: "Ampla provided the ideal solution for this project".

"It delivers a flexible and scaleable solution based on the customer's immediate and also future needs".

"The modular architecture that is central to Ampla's flexibility enables the MES system to be set up in many different ways, with customers creating their own KPIs This is important both for initial integration of the MES, and for future development, as it means that Ampla complements Ryvita's business rather than conflicts with it; something which is often sited as a problem with other MES systems".

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