Managing Automation - March 2008 - (Page 22)

[ COVER STORY ] Dairy Crest Milking Integration for All It’s Worth air y Crest, the United Kingphase-one implementation of EBS financials, dom’s largest manufacturer of procurement, engineering, and process manuchilled dair y products, buys facturing, Dairy Crest decided to look for opabout 2.6 billion liters of milk portunities at each plant to integrate the new per year, turning that raw maERP system with existing process control and terial into butter, cheese, and other plant floor systems. The idea, Duckett other consumables that gensays, was to use the common ERP platform as a erate more than $3 billion a repository for capturing, analyzing, and reportyear in sales. ing on transactional information being generated Until recently, however, by plant floor systems. Dairy Crest managers had little real-time visi“Using the integration with Oracle, we felt we bility into what happened on the plant floor bewould be able to trap at each point in the manutween receipt of the raw material and the output facturing process what went in and what came of finished product. In most cases, they received out,” Duckett says. “And, if there was a signifiweekly summary reports showing what material cant variance to what was expected, we would was taken in and what was made from it, but know in a matter of minutes or hours versus a they weren’t able to easily drill into the informamatter of days.” tion to determine, for example, where waste or Unfortunately, not all of Dairy Crest’s plants errors might be occurring. proved to be equally strong candidates for that “You could never really get into the problems kind of plant floor-to-ERP integration. Because in a realistic time frame,” says Philip Duckett, different plants were automated at different times, program manager at the company. “It was althey used a collection of process control systems. ways a generic look at the end of the week.” For that reason, some were better than others at Much of the problem, Duckett says, was due to the fact that managers couldn’t eas- Already, Dairy Crest is seeing benefits. ily access plant floor transactional data “Efficiency is improving, and waste is generated by the process control, quality, environmental, and other systems used to being reduced. We’re also able to trace manage Dairy Crest’s 15 manufacturing problems more quickly.” — Philip Duckett sites across the United Kingdom. The plant systems were, for the most part, not integrated capturing complete and accurate transactional inwith the company’s ERP systems. While ERP formation from the plant floor. Because Dairy tracked things like supplier contracts and invenCrest was not prepared to invest in upgrading all tor y, and the process systems controlled the of its plant systems as well as its ERP environmovement of materials through various producment, the company decided to focus its integration tion stages on the plant floor, Dairy Crest had no efforts on plants where strong automation was easy way to combine the data to quickly underalready in place and a compelling business case stand, for example, where production problems could be made. might be occurring or when supplier problems One such site was Dairy Crest’s plant in Chadmight be undermining productivity. well Heath just northeast of London. There, the That began to change three years ago, when company’s IT staff used a variety of tools, such as the company decided to replace a collection of the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) proaging, difficult-to-maintain back-office applicagramming interface, flat files, and intermediate tions with a single, common ERP platform based data staging servers to make transactional data on Oracle Corp.’s E-Business Suite. As part of a generated through the site’s Invensys APV ma March 22 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Managing Automation - March 2008

Managing Automation - March 2008 Contents Take 1 Mailbox Mitsubishi, IBM, and ILS Team Up to Make Integration Easy for Automakers Former Agile Exec Takes the Reins at Arena Solutions The Next Phase for 2006’s PM Award Winner Integration Firm Boomi Redesigns for On-Demand Ex-Wonderware Chief Takes Helm at Apprion Notes Cover Story: A Rare Breed Special Report: Where are Control Architectures Heading? Transformation: Back to Reality Integration: Getting Standards Under One Roof Industries: The Quest for the Perfect Order Product Scan Advertiser Index Next

Managing Automation - March 2008

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