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Product category: Data acquisition Software and Communications
News Release from: Marco | Subject: DataMaster
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 09 January 2003

Weighing systems provide traceability

Marco Weighing Systems is helping leading UK bakery group Greggs meet rapidly growing demand from thousands of hungry customers.

Marco Weighing Systems is helping leading UK bakery group Greggs meet the rapidly growing demand from the thousands of hungry customers it supplies each day with breads, sandwiches, savouries and cakes Greggs was founded as a family bakery business on Tyneside in the 1930s by John Gregg

Under the leadership of his son Ian, the retail chain has now expanded throughout the UK, based on the regional principle of serving a cluster of stores from a central bakery, thereby achieving important efficiencies which can be passed onto the customer.

From its humble beginnings, Greggs has now grown to become the UK's leading specialist retailer of bakery and takeaway products.

The company, which also owns the Bakers Oven brand, now has around 1200 shops and 12 manufacturing centres, generating an annual turnover in excess of GBP 350 million.

There is an emphasis throughout the group on constantly improving the quality, consistency, value for money and sheer 'enjoyability' of their products.

However, as the range of goods and outlets have steadily increased, controlling and keeping track of the many different recipes at the regional bakeries has become more and more complex.

The adding of ingredients is a manual process and keeping a check on the amounts of each ingredient going into a particular batch, together with ensuring that all the required ingredients have been added is very difficult As the project leader at Greggs points out: "We had been looking for over three years for a suitable recipe system which would integrate directly with our main AS400 computer system and we were determined to find the right one.

When we eventually talked with Marco we realised that their system would provide exactly what we were looking for".

Marco's approach to business is simple.

They take the time and trouble to talk with their customers from senior management through to the shop floor operatives.

By listening to what is required, the company has developed a range of the most up to date weighing and control systems.

Marco's Technical Director, Murray Hilborne, is clear on his company's philosophy, "We know that the key to successful recipe weighing is providing the optimum blend of integration and control.

Although we have an extensive range of standard equipment, we tailor all our hardware and software to each application to meet individual client requirements - precisely".

The first pilot installation phase is going well and five of Gregg's 12 bakery plants have taken delivery of one or two twin scale DataMaster systems with RF networking.

The DataMaster is a PC based workstation, which has been designed specifically to meet the diverse needs of today's processing industries.

DataMaster satisfies the demands being placed on companies such as Greggs for greater traceability and accountability for their products, forming the hub of any ingredient or recipe traceability application.It can be seen from the photograph that the DataMaster workstation has two separate scale platforms with different capacities, thus allowing both large and small amounts of ingredients to be weighed with the optimum accuracy.

The hardware has evolved to support Marco's powerful Trac-IT software suite, which fully encompasses all facets of factory data capture.

Based on industry standard operating platforms, it can be readily configured to integrate with bespoke in-house business systems and ensures a clean and simple interface with operators, plant and existing work procedures.

Details on specific recipes are transmitted from the central computer to these workstations.

The operator can then select the correct amount and type of each ingredient by keyboard entry or using a bar code scanner.

The system has the ability to size recipes for constantly changing demands and will register if ingredients are missed out or wrongly added.

Although the workstations are fully digital, operators also have an analogue bar graph which indicates weight change.

It has been shown that this is a highly effective method for displaying and controlling operator initiated filling processes.

Weights below the target are shown as amber, changing to green in the acceptance zone.

Where possible the system will recalculate a batch if too much of a particular ingredient is accidentally added.

As Greggs' concludes: "We had spent a long time looking for a recipe formulation system and were initially a little sceptical of Marco's claims.

However, we had no reason to be concerned.

Marco's professional approach and attention to detail has provided us with a system with the potential to integrate seamlessly with the main computer system.

We can now control all our production scheduling from a central location and stock records can be automatically updated as product is used".

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