Agropur, a global dairy processor, struggled with fragmented systems and limited visibility across 29 plants. By deploying AVEVA™ Manufacturing Execution System on CONNECT, the company standardized operations, gained real-time insights, and enabled rapid scalability. From retiring legacy systems to building a hybrid cloud platform, discover how Agropur laid the foundation for continuous improvement and future growth.
Challenges
Limited visibility into enterprise-wide performance and limited ability to track and analyze production in real time
Lack of standardized systems, resulting in independently operated plants with inconsistent practices for similar products
Difficulty scaling operations due to fragmented systems and processes
Results
Improved overall equipment effectiveness by integrating AVEVA Manufacturing Execution System to manage operations and analyze operational data
Gained real-time visibility into plant performance and KPIs
Standardized systems across plants, making operations easier to scale and support
Engineers and operators can proactively simulate the plant through an external HMI built in Excel
Agropur is a global top 20 dairy processor, one of the five largest cheese makers in the US, and the largest dairy processing cooperative in Canada. The company produces consumer dairy products under a wide range of regional and national brands and for B2B trade, such as food ingredients for industrial customers, food services, and private labels for major grocery chains.
After growing the business through mergers and acquisitions, Agropur faced several challenges in managing the 29 plants it operates coast to coast across North America today. Each of the seven plants in the US and the 22 plants in Canada had individual plant systems, and the company had no visibility and control of the applications’ costs and footprints. All these systems were customized to plant-specific needs, which made them hard to sustain and support. Additionally, the US and Canadian business units weren’t talking to each other and maintained different practices to produce similar products.
Agropur quickly realized that this operating model was not sustainable and that it must transform to grow and stay relevant in the market. The company decided to start a transformation journey towards a customer-centric operating model. The transformation project, called Leap, was initiated to connect Agropur people and processes into one agile organization that empowered all employees to deliver customer value and drive operational performance through a business transformation enabled by data and technology.
“We deployed AVEVA MES to streamline our data flow processes and leveraged the CONNECT platform to centralize everything in a one-stop place for everyone.”
--Maxime Tremblay, Sr. Manager, IT Manufacturing Applications, Agropur
Embarking on the journey
Agropur leveraged two main technologies for its transformation journey: SAP as its standard ERP system, and AVEVA Manufacturing Execution System (MES) to support the manufacturing operations side.
The MES deployment project was split into two phases, with phase one focused on cheese, butter and ingredients production and phase two on fresh and frozen products. To quickly roll out phase one in parallel with the SAP implementation, the initial MES solution scope aimed to be sufficient to retire all legacy applications and lay the foundations to enable Agropur to add to the MES solution later. The phase one MES scope included the standardization of all functionalities related to master data managed in SAP from an inbound perspective, such as process orders and material data, which were automatically synchronized with the MES through enterprise integration functionalities. Running on the shop floor, the MES solution tracks all operational activities and processes, reports all order execution back to SAP, and provides real-time visibility into what has been produced for current production orders.
To scale the MES solution quickly, Agropur went with a PLC data concentrator standardization approach to the integration with the automation layer. The system acts like a funnel that communicates master data information from the MES into the control network layer and provides all data required to be monitored and captured up to the MES through that PLC concentrator. Additionally, Agropur standardized the interfaces for label printing and other printing requirements.
Before deploying the MES solution to the first site, the team at Agropur set clear expectations: rollout might be challenging, but resilience would be key. Everyone was encouraged to embrace the learning curve, reassured that the deployment team would support them to resolve issues quickly and collaboratively. That first rollout became a foundation for learning, with each obstacle turned into an opportunity for improvement.
These learnings were systematically applied to each subsequent deployment, streamlining the process. Over time, what began as a complex and demanding initiative evolved into a repeatable copy-and-paste approach, demonstrating the power of continuous improvement and teamwork.
As a result, Agropur was able to deploy and standardize 15 cheese, butter and ingredients production sites on the phase one MES solution in 18 months. The team is working to refine the design for phase two—deploying an MES solution to its fresh and frozen products production sites—with the same philosophy of quickly scaling a well-defined MES solution scope, site after site in waves.
“We have the base with the MES and automation layer. Agropur was looking at how it could leverage that infrastructure through a process improvement initiative. The approach they took was to leverage the existing MES and AVEVA’s new technology—hybrid MES on CONNECT—on their plants while working with the technology and people to drive process improvement.”
- Blair Hembruff, Chief Engineer and President, Cygnus Consulting
Solution
Deployed AVEVA™ Manufacturing Execution System to streamline production data collection, access, and calculations, and leveraged CONNECT as a centralized solution for analysis, reporting, and trends.
The transition to a hybrid cloud MES solution
With the base MES layer and automation integration implemented in several plants, the Agropur Operating System team wanted to leverage the investment for the continuous improvement process. They decided to use the newest technology from AVEVA and extend the on-premises MES deployments into a hybrid cloud solution. CONNECT industrial intelligence platform provides a scalable repository for operational data storage from Agropur’s distributed plant operations with data visualization, analyses and information sharing capabilities, which are easy and secure to access by different business functions and locations.
The hybrid cloud MES transition rollout started with a set of four US cheese plants that promised the highest return from process improvements through technology investments. To be able to measure plant performance, perform root cause analyses and drive plant productivity improvements, the MES functionalities for running the plants were extended to track all events impacting production processes and asset utilization.
The plant operator user interface was enhanced with plant equipment utilization event screens. Operators and supervisors were trained to register production downtime using utilization events and reason codes collected by the PLC concentrator and pushed to the MES. The MES solution, already configured to manage and track production execution, automatically records and reports all utilization events within the full work order and scheduled product context.
To additionally collect production process and asset performance data in real-time resolution, the existing AVEVA™ Historian was configured in each plant and connected to a tier 2 historian instance.
The extended MES solutions and AVEVA Historian setup were integrated with CONNECT data services to securely bring plant production events and performance data to the cloud platform. This provided a centralized analytics and reporting system that is accessible to the whole company.
Agropur visualizes OEE trends via CONNECT visualization capabilities.
Because Agropur was participating in a CONNECT lighthouse program, AVEVA helped both Agropur and its system integrator partner, Cygnus, with the missing navigation and visualization capabilities. Users can now select a plant on a map of North America to drill down into plant production information for viewing plant utilization and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) trends. Agropur executives have a dashboard that rolls up KPIs for the whole company.
For specific ways to visualize data, Agropur leveraged CONNECT integration with Microsoft Power BI. It allows Agropur to quickly satisfy its individual or very specific data visualization needs and to embed these into the CONNECT visualization capabilities without an external service provider.
The foundation for continuous improvement at business scale
With the deployment of AVEVA MES to streamline data collection and calculations on-premises, and use of the CONNECT platform to centralize data to provide a one stop location for everyone, production planning is now performed with real-time visibility across integrated divisions. Agropur’s operational improvement team is now working with that data to improve OEE.
Moving forward, Agropur is looking to build on its AVEVA™ PI System™ investment across 23 of its facilities by integrating it with CONNECT and expanding its MES capabilities into a full-featured, end-to-end solution.
Product highlights
AVEVA Manufacturing Execution System
Formerly Known As Wonderware MES
Maximize profitability, flexibility, quality, and compliance in manufacturing by digitally managing the rules and information for all operational activities and plant events in real-time. A work process-centric and Model-driven approach reduce the time to value and cost of ownership for both plant deployments and multi-site MES rollouts.
CONNECT
Our industrial intelligence platform: securely access the broadest and deepest industrial software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio enhanced by the power of industrial Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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