F&N Dairies needed to maintain consistent high-quality products and reduce waste while keeping operating costs to a minimum. The company used the AVEVA Manufacturing Execution System as the foundation for its in-house automation software solution, Process Nexus II, to efficiently monitor its manufacturing processes. This solution offered operations transparency while establishing a foundation for compliance, product traceability, and profitability.
"With this system, F&N has reduced inventory in our warehouses, created cost savings, and achieved payback from our system investment within one year.”
Somchai Khwahan, Production Manager, F&N Dairies
Goals
- Monitor manufacturing processes in real time to improve record-keeping and meet requirements for product quality and ingredient traceability
- Facilitate connectivity of plant operations with industrial automation devices, computers, and laboratory measuring instruments
- Reduce the total cost of ownership by enabling easy upgrades of systems across the enterprise
Challenge
- Plant operators had to manually trace product data in archived, paper-based operations sheets to determine the cause of quality issues, which took a tremendous about of time
Results
- Reduced product quality traceability time from four hours to only one minute
- The manufacturing facility achieved its return on investment within one year
- The plant achieved “100% First-Time Quality,” a metric that indicates what parts are manufactured correctly the first time without the need for inspection, rework, or replacement
- The plant achieved its production goal of 2,500 cans a minute, equivalent to 3M cans a day or 24M cases a year
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