No matter what your industry or company size, now may be the time to upgrade—or install—the manufacturing operations management software your company needs. Manufacturers have operational systems in place, whether manual, electronic or some mix, but continuous improvement initiatives are pushing change. So users are moving to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), pre-integrated solutions that are delivering actionable information in weeks and ROI in two years or less. The result is operations people feeling empowered by measurable progress, and engineers becoming heroes by delivering on the strategic goals set by their executives.

“By giving [operators] more accurate data, allowing them to work on real problems and giving them real solutions, they now watch those [status] boards. If they know they are close to a record, you should just see them go after it,” says Don Enstrom, senior director of manufacturing and engineering service for private-label beverage producer Cliffstar. “The last production record in our first plant was set in 2009. Since the system went live, they have broken that record twice, so they continue to set the bar higher for themselves. And they continue to use the [software] tools to do it.”

Despite a reputation for requiring too much time and effort for too little plant floor benefit, manufacturing execution system (MES) and management operations management (MOM) software have improved since the term “MES” was coined in the early 1990s. Two decades of refinement to production system models and standards has created industry-specific production knowledge and faster implementation tools and techniques. The result is that although there may be hundreds of COTS software packages and MES experts to choose from, many are likely to really be experts in your industry’s needs and processes.

“Most customers already have systems that are doing something—even if it’s macro level planning and scheduling with Microsoft Excel. There’s a lot of work going on with spreadsheets,” says Dan O’Brien, solution manager, manufacturing execution systems, for automation vendor Honeywell Process Solutions in Phoenix. “I was at our user advisory board meeting and a paper manufacturer said, ‘One of the biggest challenges I’m trying to deal with is the 1,200 – 1,300 spreadsheets that we’re using to do various things.’ An integrated oil manufacturer said, ‘Well, that’s pretty tough, but we’ve got 31,000 spreadsheets.’ ”

In pulp and paper, as in other industries, the purpose of operational systems is simple: “You have time scheduling and also physical scheduling. You’re trying to waste the least stuff,” says O’Brien. “If you’ve got more than one facility, you’re looking across your transportation costs. If another mill can make the same grade of paper and be closer to the delivery destination, you’re going to want to make it there. All of the above is the fundamental blocking and tackling that an MES does.”

Giant data factories

“Those systems exist, and they are giant data factories,” continues O’Brien. Every roll of paper has customer IDs, quality data, and the like. At the same time, MES/MOM systems are consumers of data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like SAP, and from process system scanners, control systems and event logs. What’s primarily happening now is an emphasis on bringing all that information together, consolidating the data to make better decisions.

Cliffstar’s Don Enstrom retired from Kraft North America and came to the private-label beverage maker in western New York to “capitalize on lessons learned and be able to do it over again.” Speaking at this year’s Packaging Automation Forum, an event co-hosted by Automation World , Enstrom described how Cliffstar’s engineering department used first manual than electronic MESs to bring shopfloor data together and empower juice bottling plant operators to make better decisions. 

ENTERPRISE VIEW: Read how Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) is incorporated into enterprise-level Business Process Management strategies.

As a $700 million a year privately held company that produces about 60 percent of all of the private label beverages (juice, soda and purified water) in North America, Cliffstar was experiencing juice-plant losses that management wanted addressed and engineering identified to go after within operations.

“The direct losses were predominantly in process variance on our raw materials,” says Enstrom. Fruit juice processing has a very high cost component because a lot of the concentrates—flavorings like pomegranate—are imported and therefore very expensive additives. “We had raw material direct losses of 1 percent plus process-variance-driven raw losses of 4 percent, which [amounted to] 50 percent of the dollar opportunity for improvement,” Enstrom says.

A reduction in labor losses, through better utilization of direct labor through higher throughputs, was estimated to ...