Manufacturing Executive - November 2008 - (Page 24) I NTEGRATION BLENDING and ERP MES a 24 November 2008 Ahold Coffee executives gain valuable manufacturing insights from the integration of MES and ERP, improving their decision making and saving money. BY MARK HALPER s the second largest roaster in a countr y renowned for coffee, Holland’s Ahold Coffee Co. travels to exotic and faraway places for beans — Sumatra, Kenya, Colombia, Costa Rica, you name it. But it was the mundane challenge of tracking shop floor activity at home that drove one of Ahold’s most important recent business improvements: the installation of an IT system on the packaging lines. By percolating data up from machine sensors to the boardroom using manufacturing execution system (MES) software tied into enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, Ahold has made smarter decision makers of executives who stir up ever ything from sales plans to customer strategies. Ahold, which is part of the giant €41 billion Royal NV Ahold food retailer, was finding that the lack of timely knowledge about events at its two huge roasters and 15 packaging lines in Zaandam, Holland, was costing it money. The lines churn out private-labeled packages of a wide variety of coffee for European retailers, such as Morrisons and Asda in the United Kingdom; Albert Heijn and C1000 in Holland; Kesko, in Finland; and Ica in Sweden. An outage on one line can affect how much to plan and how to price for a given customer or, for instance, how much more espresso to make versus, say, a mild strength grind. In the past, Ahold executives, if they were even aware of outages, were clueless about details. “We couldn’t distinguish one line from an- Illustration: Phillip Gallof
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