How a Global Pet Food Manufacturer is using Ferry

A leading multinational pet food & animal feed manufacturer was looking to capture operational efficiencies in their pet food plant. They were looking for an end-to-end solution that could work for their upstream processes (covering extrusion and drying) as well as their downstream processes (covering bagging & packaging operations). The end goal they had in mind was a solution that could provide real-time visibility into production operations, with workflows & guidance for frontline teams to identify and realize opportunities.

Challenges in Packaging Operations

The site focused on packaging pet food had the following challenges in their downstream bagging operations:

• Real-time attainment: production progress was tailored on pen & paper, and manually inputted into systems to record order completion. The site found it impossible to track production against the schedule in real-time to make adjustments and needed corrections. This resulted in a weekly production shortfall of 20%.

• Downtime: stop reasons were infrequently recorded and not analyzed to identify improvements. This led to a production loss of $30k+ per month per line.

• Micro-stops: there was no visibility into machine performance and how it varied across product types. There was a feeling of lost production opportunity cost but no way to quantify it.

• Pen & paper processes: all production information was recorded on paper sheets, leading to transcription errors & difficult in analyzing information.

• Yield: through manual infrequent checks, the site team had an indication of significant yield loss due to overfilling of bags. However, there was a lack of real-time information to help guide where yield losses were most prevalent across products, and when losses were occurring so it can be remediated in-process.

Challenges in Extrusion Operations

The site additionally faced challenges in their extrusion & drying operations:

• Moisture loss: there was no real-time visibility into dryer temperatures throughout the process. The site team had an intuition that they were overdrying product, and therefore reducing yield - but they had no automated way of monitoring equipment settings and notifying operators on potential actions.

• Material variance: disconnected flow meters and manual workflows meant that frontline operators were not sure if they were adding too much high-value ingredient compositions. This was leading to significant inventory write-downs every month

• No real-time ROI tracking and visibility: operators had no means to automatically monitor key setpoints and configurations for extruders and dryers, relying on manual data collection. Equally, site management had no automated means to track the cost savings potential due to reducing moisture and fluid losses.

In total, challenges in packaging and extrusion operations equated to production losses estimated at $1m per year for the one site.

Putting the Operators at the Core

The company decided that it was critical to ensure that any manufacturing intelligence system must be designed with the operator experience at the core. Frontline operators are key to the successful & fluid running of production, and the site wanted to ensure that any new system was easy to learn, intuitive to use, and informative enough to provide real-time insights without requiring technical skills.

The site also wanted to ensure that a solution could be tailored to their particular processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs) on an ongoing basis. A dynamic, flexible solution was required.

The third key tenet of a required solution was to help reduce manual steps for operators when recording information, which were often error-prone. Production tracking and batch assignment were routine operations that were conducted by pen & paper, and not tied back into the broader reporting framework for the site.

Tying this all together, it was critical that any solution needed to be easily integrated into live operations, without the need for capex or significant time & resource investment. The packaging lines had some automation equipment but no PLCs, so the solution would need to be able to connect to legacy systems to identify production data. Meanwhile extruders and dryers had their own PLCs which needed to be connected to a digital solution. All of this this would need to be tied into a framework where lots could be automatically identified, with operators being able to assign them to specific products.

New approaches to production management

The site team with colleagues in operational excellence are looking at a range of manufacturing KPIs & initiatives to improve operational efficiencies on their packaging lines:

1. Real-time production & batch tracking: live throughput monitoring with automatic batch recording for frontline teams to track against the production schedule.

2. Operator guidance: providing real-time feedback to frontline teams on how production is performing to help inform changes in schedule or process. Advanced recommendations on set-point setting for machines in response to identified yield or production losses can be utilized to adjust operations in-process.

3. Analysis-led management reporting: strategic insights into SKU performance, future capacity planning and shift allocation, within a broader move towards data-led decision making.

4. Data-driven continuous improvement: providing a set of tools for data benchmarking within a site that can applied across other facilities through operational excellence initiatives.

Outcomes

Within one quarter, the client identified core sources of operational inefficiencies that when combined would lead to over 30% increase in production.

Micro-stops and variations in line speed if increased by 1 bag per minute would result in a 10% increase in throughput, with potential upside of an additional 30% if target run speeds could be reached. The top ten most troublesome SKUs were identified as a source of productivity gains.

Downtime reasons were monitored & quantified, leading to the identification of a 15% increase in uptime by reducing changeover times and unplanned interruptions to production.

Real-time yield monitoring resulted in the identification of a 2%-3% average yield loss due to overfilling of packages, which could be offset by better regulation of process setup.

Moisture loss was captured in real-time across both extruder lines, measuring potential cost savings and deviation of dryer temperatures from accepted thresholds. This combined with fluid loss tracking enabled frontline operators to adjust SOPs to reduce yield and raw material losses in-process.