Download PDF
GainSeeker Suite turns art into science at baking company
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Functional Applications - Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Process Manufacturing
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Machine Condition Monitoring
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
As the private label producer of baked goods for major brands, the company's reputation relies on ensuring that each cracker and cookie it produces meets the taste, quality expectations, and specifications of its customer's brand. Company leadership wanted to shift the company from knowledge-driven behavior to data-driven behavior. They believed that real-time data, delivered via real-time statistical process control charts, was the key to this effort. This data would enable them to reduce variation at critical points in the process and thereby increase the consistency of processes, and ultimately, the finished product.
About The Customer
Hertzler Systems has been a leader in Statistical Process Control, SPC Software, and Six Sigma for over twenty-five years. They provide the leading real-time data acquisition and analytics SPC software, the GainSeeker Suite. Hertzler Systems serves a diverse customer base, including BAE Systems, Crown Audio, McCormick & Company, Inc., Hormel Foods Corporation, Snyders of Hanover, Titleist & Footjoy, IDEX Corporation, and TaylorMade-Adidas Golf Worldwide. Their software and services enable clients to connect, collect, analyze, and visualize data, building a data infrastructure for making data-driven decisions. These capabilities help clients improve throughput and yield, improve cycle times, reduce costs and errors, and increase profitability.
The Solution
Hertzler Systems automated and expanded the company's fledgling manual data system. Beginning in the packaging area, they expanded the deployment upstream to all aspects of processing and baking. The system is fully integrated with other business systems (ERP and financials) and includes the delivery of critical product documentation such as photos of packaging and label details. Empowering workers with real-time data has enabled the company to quickly identify inconsistencies. With readily-accessible data at all stages of the production process, workers are able to pinpoint the sources of problems and correct them rapidly. This has resulted in a positive shift in the company's culture as these empowered workers take more responsibility and ownership for their processes.
Operational Impact
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
Energy Management System at Sugar Industry
The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.
Case Study
Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study
Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.
Case Study
Temperature Monitoring for Restaurant Food Storage
When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. Although not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.
Case Study
Coca-Cola Refreshments, U.S.
Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola branded refrigerators in retail establishments. Legacy systems were used to locate equipment information by logging onto multiple servers which took up to 8 hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.
