Case Study: Collaboration in the Food and Beverage Industry Using Business Process Management

 

For the Food and Beverage Industry, keeping profitable operations means an informed workforce, tuned equipment, and quick response to any adverse or unplanned conditions.
For many organizations, standardized practices are critical for maintaining a baseline that can be measured and improved, especially if multiple locations are involved.

Business Process Management, or BPM, is a collaboration solution that allows organizations to establish baseline processes that can be standardized and deployed over multiple lines and sites. The food and beverage industry is a great example of an industry that can benefit from BPM, since they establish SOP's (Standard Operating Procedures) and implement, enforcing predicable and optimized performance.

An example is a Wonderware customer who is a leading blottler for a major global beverage brand in Europe.
This customer is a trend setter in the European business community for corporate policies, as well as for excellence in business administration and talent management. The customer operatoes plants across multiple locations in Europe and Africa.  This lead to challenges in terms of centralizing information and specific task allocations:

• There were no automated/standardized processes in response to disruptive events on the plant floor.  Most of the processes were manually executed.
• Critical maintenance information was known to just a few individuals, and information was not being shared. Manual information exchanges lead to a delay in processing orders, as well as delays in maintenance response.
• A solution was needed to enhance their Manufacturing Execution System, to provide process monitoring, security, and further collaboration.

The solution needed to provide closed-loop remediation of issues across platforms, and also had to be plant user friendly to ensure maximum productivity.  The customer chose Wonderware Workflow.

The customer intends to use workflow to standardized their best practices, to replicate across their multiple locations to ensure maintenance workflows are quickly triggered and optimally executed, ensuring procedure integrity.