November 17, 2020
Brock Solutions has been selected to implement an enterprise based Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for a major provider of flexible packaging. The company has over 20 global manufacturing plants that specialize in extrusion, lamination, printing, and converting. They serve a variety of industries including dairy, coffee, proteins, agriculture, frozen foods, confectionary, and pet foods. The company has seen large scale growth over the years including organic growth and acquisitions. This has led to a manufacturing landscape with a large variety of systems, levels of automation, standardization, reporting mechanisms, and widespread tribal knowledge. With a strong lean and continuous improvement mindset geared towards innovation and performance, the company is glad to partner up with Brock Solutions to consolidate best practices to drive efficiencies and cost savings.
The company reached out to Brock Solutions to help define how to get started, where to focus to drive business value, what facilities to start, and what technology solution. Through a fast paced, short time-boxed framework study, Brock took time to understand the manufacturing landscape across a variety of representative sites and pressing areas that they could drive immediate business value. A strong focus was placed on identifying, capturing, and reducing waste along with improvements in performance and quality. Coming out of the framework study, Brock recommended developing the manufacturing landscape around Inductive Automation Ignition platform. This provided a rapid development environment using standard templates and modules that allowed for a repeatable solution.
Brock Solutions is working on the initial project focused on reducing waste and improving uptime in the Press area. In parallel, we are also starting to embark on leveraging this solution through extrusion with the addition of quality management. The overall strategy is to prove out the value in key areas of the business, then quickly replicate and rollout the repeatable solution.
