Lighthouse MES Supporting The World's Biggest Packaging Companies

Giant packaging manufacturers typically supply global FMCG companies who jealously guard high-profile brands in the beer, beverage, food, cosmetics and household products industries. For them, quality is not an objective, it's an absolute.

These brand owners consequently have stringent specification and quality requirements that they impose on their packaging suppliers. With large volumes of product at stake they can bring huge commercial pressures to bear on them too.

A supplier's processes are likely to be highly automated, high speed and high volume. Controlling quality to stringent levels at high production rates in a JIT environment is a challenge. The product is made, shipped and filled in no time at all.

Quality has to be controlled at the point of production in a disciplined and organised manner. Can manufacturers are typical of the packaging sector and, as with all suppliers, the challenge is to drive down costs, reduce spoilage and improve quality.

They also face pressures common to the industry: a continuous quest to reduce material costs (metals, plastics and so on), spoilage, customer complaints and energy consumption, and to work to ever more stringent environmental demands.

Lighthouse's Shopfloor-Online MES Factory Information System software is being used to improve process control and quality by the biggest players in the industry. Companies like Rexam, Crown, GCS, Constar and Alcan have all deployed it on a multi-site international basis. Every second, somewhere in the world another quality check is being recorded in a packaging plant using Shopfloor-Online MES.

Can-making example

Can making is a huge sector of the packaging industry. There are two types of cans produced: two-piece and three-piece cans with different processes involved. It's a high volume business. Plants making cans typically produce millions of units a day.

The manufacturing process is fully automated with many stages. Two-piece cans start life as aluminium (or steel) sheet being spooled off the drum and pressed and drawn into shape, washed, printed and lacquered both internally and externally. Finally, the neck is formed and the can inspected by fully-automated in-line test equipment.

For three-piece cans, production starts with coils of steel which is cut into sheets which are then cut further to blanks, rolled and welded, beaded to give strength, flanged and then one end is seam-welded on.

These familiar everyday objects look simple enough but belie a hidden complexity in manufacturing. There are crucial dimensional requirements and many defining characteristics that have to be controlled; these tend to fall into three categories:

Importance to the end user:

• The integrity of the can - a leaking can could harbour dangerous bacteria.
• The quality of the internal lacquer coating - it must prevent the contents from tasting metallic.
• The functionality of the ring-pull.

Importance to the customer:

• Everything that could endanger the brand - the integrity of the can; the quality of the graphics and print

Importance to the filler:

Aside from obvious things such as the dimensions of the can and the end (so that the end can be sealed) there are some less obvious considerations:

• The strength of the can when it is stacked
• The ease with which cans can travel in track work - the filling equipment might run at a rate of 1800 cans a minute, so it is vital that the flow of incoming cans is smooth and trouble-free. A ‘sticky' one can cause a jam and even if it were only one in 10,000 cans that would still mean a jam every 6 minutes!

More than one hundred characteristics of the can and the process have to be monitored. Some are obviously more important than others, but all need to be inspected and recorded.

It is equally not uncommon for a factory to conduct more than 1000 quality checks (a combination of manual and automatic) each shift and record over 20 million measurements in a year.

A Challenging Environment

The quality aspect of this environment demands close management. Most of the quality checks have to be done by the operators running the process, but the checks all have different samples sizes and frequencies. Operators can be supported to ensure that all the required checks get done.

With such large amounts of data being recorded, people need increasingly to be exception-driven. They need to be alerted to problems as they arise rather than have to sift through data.

Detailed analysis needs to be on hand so that problem areas can be quickly looked at to understand what might be going wrong. Tools such as XR charts and histograms need to be put quickly in the hands of operators to help them decide whether or not to make process interventions.

Such high-volume, high-speed and complex manufacturing entails high risk. It is a challenge to which the functionality and ease of use of Lighthouse Systems' Shopfloor-Online MES Factory Information System are perfectly matched.

How Shopfloor-Online MES reduces commercial risk - and improves performance

Where organisations strive for lean manufacturing, Shopfloor-Online provides unequalled support for both operators and managers. It provides a framework of disciplined quality control that is easily demonstrable to customers. It also creates a platform for process improvement.

Shopfloor-Online MES holds the complete inspection plan, with all the idiosyncrasies of different processes or products. Shopfloor-Online MES also knows all the specifications - as and when the lines change over to other products, it knows the checks that need to be done and the specs to check against. Operators are reminded when checks are due and they are guided through each check.

The measurement values transfer directly from the measuring gauges to the software, with measurements from automatic gauges automatically transferred. All measurements are tested against specifications and statistical process control (SPC) rules. Any violations are flagged and operators are prompted to record any remedial actions.

Managers are able to see reports that verify that all the required checks have been carried out; they can see any and all problems and summaries of remedial actions. Reporting extends from real-time exception-based to monthly performance measures and there are powerful analytical tools.

Company-wide benefits

Adopting Lighthouse's Shopfloor-Online MES software has highly beneficial implications for ROI over and above those related directly to the manufacturing process.

Shopfloor-Online MES at last makes it possible to impose a disciplined, standardised control plan throughout a plant - and, being a web-based application, it has the power to provide global visibility of a multi-national company's diverse worldwide manufacturing operations.

It provides everyone with the information to make informed decisions, from operator-level functions to broader aspects such as supplier performance in terms of raw material quality. The immediacy of the feedback has a major effect on raising and maintaining end-product quality.

Similarly, customer service standards are raised because it becomes possible to respond to requests for information faster and more professionally.

By moving quality control from inspectors to those responsible for the actual processes empowers the operatives concerned - and in some cases it can mean manpower savings.

Substantial amounts of time can also be saved that indirect staff previously spent on gathering and collating data and producing reports. Benchmarking key aspects of the process is made simpler too.