Future Factory F&B

With this approach, the large dairy concentrated on solving the two most urgent challenges: First, an optimal factory structure had to be restored as quickly as possible. This involved not only the reconstruction of different parts of the building on the factory site, which had been damaged by bombs and fires, but also the restart and stabilization of the demanding processes of milk processing. On the other hand, the existing but highly fragmented digital solutions had to be integrated and further developed for all workflows to function smoothly. 

This already set the "bar" of the project exceptionally high. However, there was another challenge: Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the ROI-EFESO team carried out the entire project via "remote operation", i.e. via video conferences and online sessions from a distance of 4,000 kilometers.

Instead of proceeding sequentially, the project team of about ten team members on site and five consultants in Germany therefore pursued two planning strands simultaneously. It developed a concept for the Future Factory 2030 in combination with a digitization initiative. For both strands, the team considered Industrie 4.0 scenarios and technologies and developed a roadmap for implementing the proposals in future project phases.

During the conceptual design of the "Future Factory" it became apparent that the existing factory layout was highly complex and created or reinforced hurdles and inefficiencies in the work processes. These included cleaning, skimming and heat treatment of the milk as well as other typical steps in the production of standard and group products. In total, production with a workforce of around 800 employees was spread over nine separate buildings with up to four levels.

In order to create an optimal "foundation" for the Future Factory that can exist beyond 2030, first the objectives were clarified:

• Simplification of the complex material flow with 60 product groups distributed over different building levels
• Use of automation to cope with labour shortages, e.g. by means of end-of-line automation (automatic palletising)
• Ensuring compliance with hygiene zones, e.g. through appropriate route concepts and the consolidation of identical hygiene zones in the layout

The project team ensured transparency by involving all relevant stakeholders in the company and moderating at important points, for example in the event of varying understandings of processes among those involved in the project. Since the team was given a high degree of freedom by management in developing the concept, it quickly achieved results thanks to committed employees and a narrowing down and prioritization of the most important tasks.

The team was also confronted with challenging initial conditions for the digitization initiative. In particular, the "gaps" between the IT and OT departments proved to be problematic: Their technological separation led to a high level of manual effort in order to create transparency concerning the current status of production. At the same time, the organizational separation of the departments resulted in the development of different solutions for the same task. And last, but not least, there was no clear overall picture of the use of the approximately 15 existing IT and OT solutions, some of which were very individually designed.

In addition to the IT/OT integration, the following challenges also had to be solved:

• low use by employees of existing technological solutions that could facilitate their work
• low transparency in the supply chain and a lack of "early" identification of resource bottlenecks
• unclear priorities and long lead times in product development
• frequent changes in production planning, which additionally increased the complexity in production
• a reorganisation of the data collection, which until now was carried out from several, heterogeneous data sources with partly inconsistent data

One of the biggest challenges for everyone involved in the project was to master complete "remote planning". After all, without any on-site presence, it was very difficult to develop a feeling for the actual spatial conditions in the dairy. In addition, a high degree of complexity had to be mastered in both project strands. This succeeded excellently due to the committed teamwork of both project streams as well as other success factors:

Success factors of factory planning

• Factory planning must be oriented to the corporate strategy, which provides the guidelines and thus a stable framework for planning.
• The basis for stable layout planning are predefined concepts, especially for production and logistics. If the concepts change, then the space requirements also change, which leads to a considerable amount of unrest in the layout planning.
• Stakeholders should be involved in good time so that any need for change can be considered at an early stage.
• Guidelines "Greenfield - Brownfield" and "Planning level from coarse to detailed" should be followed consistently. In the latter case, it is important to find the right granularity in layout planning, i.e. how many individual area elements must be arranged in layout planning. If their number increases, the complexity in the planning increases - but at the same time the accuracy in the layout also increases.

Success factors for Industry 4.0 initiative

• Using the same solution for different areas brings enormous advantages. At the same time, this requires a lot of coordination so that all parties involved understand these advantages.
• Remote testing requires the best possible technical equipment for the actors on both sides (body cams, video and communication systems).