Company

Colussi Group, a historic Italian food company, brings together some of the most renowned and virtuous Made in Italy brands such as Colussi, Misura, Agnesi, Flora, Sapori di Siena 1832, representing the great Italian food tradition worldwide. The company’s production is distributed across 7 plants with an installed capacity of over 300,000 tons of finished products per year, distributed in Italy and over 60 countries worldwide, with a turnover of approximately €400 million. The company employs about 1,300 people, totaling nearly 2 million working hours annually.

Context

The primary goal of introducing the new MES system was to achieve complete monitoring of the production lines at the Petrignano plant, where over 500 people work across three shifts with different roles and responsibilities.

In more detail, the objectives were:

• Obtain real-time information on all activities performed on the production lines (times, quantities, process variables, etc.)
• Standardize and simplify data collection procedures to minimize impact on factory personnel
• Eliminate paper-based devices previously used for data collection
• Provide reliable and timely statistics on key performance indicators (KPIs) of the production process

Solution

The company selected MES Compass software for monitoring and controlling production processes, with implementation starting in 2009. The first step involved modeling the production process to map data collection points (currently around 90 touch-screen panels) and configuring procedures to ensure accurate data acquisition with minimal operator impact.

The “ergonomics” of the data collection procedures were designed to facilitate activity declarations while maintaining data quality. Touch-screen panels connected via Wi-Fi to the company network were installed, equipped with CCD scanners for barcode reading. Integration with field systems (line PLCs) was also implemented to automatically acquire much of the necessary data from the production lines (piece counts, machine states: running and downtime, weights recorded by in-line scales, and measurements of process variables such as dough temperature, overweight, humidity, etc.).

The COMPASS system is also used for collecting quality control measurements during the production process.

Quality control schedules and variables were defined, and the system notifies factory operators (via alarms on panels at startup, shift changes, and scheduled times) to perform specific quality checks based on product type, line station, operator qualification, and time elapsed since production start.

The implemented factory panel now allows for entering all production-related information that cannot be automatically acquired from line PLC integrations (such as tooling declarations and/or reasons for certain downtimes). Back-office functions within COMPASS enable the generation of plant reports and detailed analysis of all production data through drill-down and drill-up logic.

Results

The MES Compass enabled:

• Significant reduction in waste and scrap; continuous monitoring of weight variables (for some products) led to a notable reduction in raw material consumption through immediate corrective actions suggested by the system when weight control limits were exceeded
• Reliable and complete monitoring of production progress at each station of the various lines (production and packaging)
• Real-time access to all relevant quality control information of the production process on an easy-to-use platform
• Real-time KPI calculation