Dedication to Quality: Understanding Their Background
It quickly became clear, like many food manufacturers, the top priority for this global leader in frozen food manufacturing was to maintain the most stringent levels of quality. Even though they actively produce and sell food and seasonings worldwide, they continue to adhere to the principles that have been at the core of the company since its founding. SafetyChain has become a trusted partner of theirs because of their shared core belief in providing the highest quality product. Because of this dedication to maximizing productivity while ensuring compliance, SafetyChain was a perfect fit to align with their needs.
Applying High Standards to the Software Search
The Senior Quality Engineer at this food manufacturer shared that SafetyChain has provided the missing link to streamline facility processes across the board, ensuring each plant consistently meets corporate quality standards. While many different software companies can transition facilities to paperless and automated Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), SafetyChain stood out for several reasons. Firstly, they are an enterprise-wide platform that improves yield, maximizes productivity, and ensures compliance, rather than a siloed point solution. This allowed clear communication and visibility to corporate, empowering individual facilities to focus on increased productivity while also meeting the high-quality standards.
After purchasing their competitor, the need grew to provide a clear path for new facilities to better align with the quality-driven approach rather than a profit-driven approach. While Excel could generate comprehensive and detailed reports, it was not user-friendly for management who were not proficient in Excel. Additionally, it took extensive amounts of time to perform data entry.
This leader in food manufacturing knew that the best way to continue to drive quality in the newly acquired facilities and unify OEE and quality standards, was to bring in a system they could install in all the US facilities. The facilities needed real-time graphs and charts and a unified set of standards that could help facilities align with Group standards. After they examined 23 different software solutions and held numerous meetings for over a year, SafetyChain rose to the top as the clear OEE software choice aligned with their intense commitment to quality.
While the global leader in frozen food manufacturing was already operating successfully and saw positive growth, the drive for high quality was always present. Implementing OEE software that tells the story of the whole operation was essential to bringing facilities in line with quality directives from headquarters. They needed to track data from sensors and equipment with real-time insights to move closer to reaching full potential. Moving OEE tracking into SafetyChain has given them access to real time interpretation, allowing for more efficient competition. Their persistence for quality led them to also reach high production as well.
Striving for Full OEE Potential
In the past, facilities struggled to meet standards and directives from headquarters, and OEE numbers reflected this. SafetyChain was an attractive solution for several reasons:
- Enterprise Aspect: An enterprise-level platform enables better visibility and unity across all plants. Suppose one plant is performing well and another is performing poorly. In that case, corporate can compare the plants to identify any differences in production, such as the use of older equipment.
- Plant Ownership: Plants can have control over their facilities and monitor their own OEE. They can make adjustments based on their unique attributes and enhance production in-house.
- Real-Time OEE Visibility: Once operators and management could experience SafetyChain in action, it was clear that the software program was a great fit.
- Customer service: One essential selling point that made SafetyChain a winning partner was the dedicated customer service. SafetyChain worked with this top food manufacturer to make adjustments to the system to create a valuable experience. This dedication and responsiveness to requests were vital as the SafetyChain team partnered with them to meet their goals.
SafetyChain became far more than a simple software supplier. The goal for US plants was to align with corporate and to be able to take ownership and attain a higher level of self sufficiency in efficiency targets. SafetyChain is helping them to continually improve and ensure calculations are updated, aligned and that the steps are always transparent. One of SafetyChain’s approaches is to partner with their customers to ensure they can meet their needs. This was abundantly clear as SafetyChain has continued improving its software solution to better meet its needs. Members of SafetyChain’s team were willing to come and work with the executives to see what could be built or customized to create a software system that could expand and grow with the company’s needs and exacting standards.
Improving Compliance with Real-Time Data
The OEE software allows automatic data capture rather than manual input. Some facilities are still paper-based. What used to take an employee the majority of each workday to do, can now be simplified and immediate. This real-time data capture benefits plants by allowing management to track issues both within a plant and from one plant to another. Plants can also immediately identify problems that might still be within compliance and address them before they become serious inefficiencies.
The ROI on OEE Software
For general managers, the measure of success can often be found in seeing the ROIs visually. The goal is to put money to its best purpose while meeting quality standards. Managers want to see what troubled equipment looks like in one plant versus another and key in that plants may not be manufacturing the same products. Not only does SafetyChain’s OEE solution show that, but it can also hone in on an individual piece of equipment. For instance, if managers are looking at two identical lines, they expect both lines to perform the same. But other factors like the age of the equipment can affect performance, and the right OEE software can highlight those issues.
Measuring success meant ensuring real time data was available and accurate. In addition to integrating accurate data, management wanted to be sure they had brought in a system that everyone was willing and able to use. While SafetyChain could be highly complex in the background, the key to successful implementation was a simple, even ‘underwhelming’ interface for the user. Everything needed for compliance is built into the system. Users can access completed reports in the dashboard that spell out inefficiencies that were not immediately visible to everyone in the Excel spreadsheets the facilities previously used.
Improving Efficiency without Compromise: Two Examples
1. T-Max Was Not Maxed Out
A critical issue that cropped up after installing SafetyChain was unexpected. The global leader in frozen food manufacturing had been operating with the assumption that the theoretical maximum was 550 units, but as it turned out, that was not even close to the actual amount. Operations used the charts in SafetyChain’s OEE software and worked with quality assurance and quality reports. They saw a rise in performance up to 750 units, with no decrease in quality. Within two A rise in performance up to 750 units, with no decrease in quality. weeks of getting the OEE software system up and running, they were able to see that their theoretical maximum was incorrect. After speaking with operators to confirm the data, management determined the sensors were capturing production correctly. They were able to run machines faster consistently and still produce at the highest standards.
While the previous Excel system that the facilities used was accurate, it was not user-friendly. SafetyChain’s software was able to clarify discrepancies that led to the destruction of old assumptions. The sensors were working correctly, and nothing was wrong with the process—it was simply the error of assumption holding back the facility’s true potential. By processing all the data into an intuitive dashboard, the management could increase the theoretical maximum by over 36%.
2. Lowering Operational Costs
Once management implemented SafetyChain, they were able to spot potential areas of improvement immediately. In addition to the theoretical maximum example, SafetyChain helped identify several minor inefficiencies that individually were small but added up to a significant financial impact. Operators were able to use SafetyChain to spot inefficient casing equipment. Plants were rerunning up to 25% of the product. While these reruns did not slow down the front of the line, they significantly impacted operational costs.
A Partnership
During the adoption process, the teams provided input regarding changes and improvements in the system to enhance calculations and create additional transparency. This allowed for the key needs to be understood and met.
The executive team needed simple, targeted, user-friendly reporting that accurately interpreted compliance data and was firmly based on staying inside specifications. Incorporating multiple streams of data increases accuracy but can also make it more challenging to make decisions quickly. The SafetyChain team worked to alleviate the tension between corporate standards and on-the-ground operations in the individual plants by identifying elements that may not have been adequately captured previously.
A Single Source of Truth
For the global leader in frozen food manufacturing, the goal was to adopt SafetyChain as a hub—a single source of information. For facilities with such a strong drive to continually meet the highest quality targets, it is essential to identify every point in the operation, from the customer complaint to the line. Whether a company is operating on a small or large scale, pinpointing, for example, when a piece of equipment underwent maintenance could be the answer to a customer complaint or quality issue. The beauty of SafetyChain’s OEE software is in its flexibility. As they successfully adopted the software, they saw the great potential in streamlining OEE in a global capacity through SafetyChain.
