Justifying the cost of a plant visibility solution

Gain tangible benefits from implementing an in-plant information solution in your food processing facility, including:

• Labour savings: Reduce rework, returns, and overproduction
• Inventory turnover savings: Improve stock rotation, reducing overstock
• Reduce scrapping of aged inventory: Serialized tracking by carton lets you know where every carton is, and lets you focus on moving products before they become too old to ship
• Save on capital investments: Ensure lines are running as efficiently as possible, so that you can produce more with your existing plant capacity
• Reduce giveaway: for standard weight products, ensure your shipments statistically comply with regulations regarding weight tolerances, while not giving away your profits.
• Reduce downtime: Be notified in real-time of events that shut down your line. Automatically notify the people responsible for keeping it running (eg: maintenance/IT), and escalate if the severity increases or no resolution is found within the expected time
• Reduce scope and risk of recalls: know what you shipped, and what went into each shipment so that if a product needs to be quarantined, only the suspect product is affected

Intangible benefits of increasing visibility are those strategic benefits that help you stay ahead of your competition:

• More informed decision making: Provide more accurate and more timely information to decision makers (eg: production management)
• Improve customer satisfaction: increased production and inventory visibility ensures your customer gets the correct shipment, on time. Happy customers will order more.

How to gain visibility?

Carlisle’s Symphony™ Plant Productivity Suite is the culmination of years of experience in providing production tracking systems for the food industry.

Filling the gap in whole-chain traceability systems

Full traceability is an ambitious goal.

• It shows your customers that your operations are in control.
• It demonstrates to Governments that the food supply is safe.
• It opens marketing opportunities by providing assurances of sustainable sources, organic origins, and non-allergenic ingredients

Without internal traceability capabilities, full-chain traceability is meaningless.

Fortunately, there are compelling business cases for implementing internal traceability:

• Operations: Traceability leads to visibility. Visibility allows productivity improvements.
• Management: Risks of recall are reduced, and recall scope is limited. But most importantly, internal traceability can quickly exonerate your facilities from guilt.

How to get there?

Carlisle’s Symphony™ Plant Productivity Suite is the culmination of years of experience in providing production tracking systems for the food industry.

Need to control your mushroom giveaway and get full traceability back to the piece?

The Symphony™: Pack- off Manager is a net weight management solution from Carlisle that allows you to closely monitor and manage the net weight of trays before they are packed into cartons. Plus, it records all the information you need for traceability purposes.

Key Benefits

• Better weight control (tighter tolerances, less “give-away”, less rework)
• Streamline operator functions, improving productivity, and reducing training requirements
• Visibility – production monitoring, operator monitoring, and yield monitoring
• Traceability of pieces into cartons, cartons into pallets, pallets to customers

How it Works:

The Symphony: Packoff Manager follows this process:

Harvest Rooms

1. A facility may have numerous stations in the harvest room(s), each equipped with a CW-90 check weigher loaded with Carlisle’s software. The operator selects the product (a tray of mushrooms, or a bulk “lug” of mushrooms), and fills it until it is within the allowable tolerances.
   
2. Transaction recording: When the tray/lug is within tolerances, a label is printed on the attached Datamax-O’Neil E-class Mark III printer,  and the operator affixes it to the product (the label has a 2D barcode with all the transaction information)
   

Slicing Area

1. Product Transformation: using a scanner with a keypad and display, the operator can convert one product into another (eg: to convert whole mushrooms into a sliced mushroom product). New product labels are printed for affixing to each tray, and the relationship is recorded for traceability purposes
   

Production Area

1. Packaging: A workstation running Carlisle Technology’s iCap is used for building cartons. The operator takes the trays that have been previously weighed, and scans the barcodes (with the Motorola DS9808 scanner) as they are placed into a carton. When full, a carton label is produced on the Datamax-O’Neil m-class printer. For bulk products, the mushrooms are loaded into cartons, and a label is produced for the carton.
   
2. Yield analysis: Trays are randomly check-weighed for cooler shrink analysis reporting
3. Pallet labelling: When an operator is finished loading a pallet of product (either the pallet is full, or he/she runs out of product), a pallet label is printed and affixed to the pallet. The label has a bar code, which links the pallet to all it’s composing cartons.

 
Features and Functionality

• Centrally controlled product file (products, packaging tare weights) accessible via web browser
• Operators assigned to stations via web browser (used for measuring productivity of operators)
• Filling of product trays (pieces) can be in separate locations from the packaging of cartons

Efficiency Reports:

• Scale report: shows production for each station within a given time period. Report showis products, quantities, weights, and giveaway
• Product report: shows production for all stations within a given time period
• Operator reports: shows production for each operator within a given time period, including efficiency metrics
• Shrink Analysis report: shows weighing on scale v

Traceability Reports:

• Carton pieces report:  shows which pieces are in a particular carton, by either entering the carton ID, or by entering one of the piece IDs
• Tray Detail Information:  shows details about a particular tray (piece), including product #, picking date/time, packaging time/date, operator, carton it went into

Administration Reports:

• Pack-off Product Listing: shows all pack-off products, with their descriptions, weight target and tolerances, tare weights

The application allows facilities to automate labour intensive manual processes.  At the click of a button, facitlies can prove that the weighted average of a production lot – or – a pallet for that matter – is compliant with the regulations outlined in the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act.

Carlisle’s Weight Compliance application will monitor the following principles of the Average System:

1. The declared quantity on a package should accurately reflect the quantity being supplied, so the average net contents of the packages in a lot may not be less than the declared net quantity.
2. The control over production should be such that the individual packages are within tolerances. No more than 2.5% of the lot may have a negative error larger than the tolerance.
3. The number of packages which may have excessive negative errors is limited. Not more than one package may contain less than twice the tolerance.

Operators have three options when it comes to setting up a batch. They can schedule by the number of pieces, the number of cartons, or can choose to sample by the pallet. Government regulations provide reference tables that are used by the application to determine sample size
based on the number of pieces in the production lot (or on the pallet if that option is selected). Depending on where the batch quantity falls within these reference tables, operators will need to sample a certain number of pieces in order to meet the requirements set out in the regulations.

Get Brochure

• Receiving: Of live animals, finished goods, packaging materials and processing ingredients
• Slaughterhouse: Receiving, lot scheduling, RFID carcass tracking and capture of hot/cold weights as well as flexible attribute capture for regulatory agencies, producers and processors
• Carcass Weighing: High speed dynamic weighing/tracking – via high accuracy monorail scales and Trolley Vision carcass tracking systems – up to 1,300 per hr.
• Hog Carcass Grading: High speed capture of fat probe data, veterinarian issues and visual or automated grader inspection
• Flexible Attributes: Flexible Attribute and Demerit Data Capture – user defined and assigned hot keys provide the ultimate flexibility to satisfy producer, processor and regulatory agency data capture needs
• Producer Payments: Producer payout management automatically prepares summary and detail of the captured quality data by producer and calculates payments based on flexible payment grids.
• Cooler Management: Fixed Station or portable wireless carcass grading systems improve cooler and cut floor management. Real-time cooler inventory and performance monitoring, shrinkage by cooler zone, segregation of product by type and grade
• RFID Ear Tags: Fixed Station or portable wireless Reading Solutions facilitate Carcass Tracking, online automatic beef age verification, online automatic beef tag retirement

Carlisle’s InSight™ Wireless WMS is the ideal solution for your warehouse management and inventory control needs.

The benefits of our new InSight™ System include:

• Greater inventory and location accuracy
• Better stock rotation
• Comprehensive control of product recall management and traceability
• Multi-Level management of product quarantine
• Productivity Monitoring Tools
• Advanced data management and web-reporting capabilities
• Connectivity to ERP, MRP and other external systems
• Scalability for future expansion
• Transforms your raw data into management information, which facilitates:
  • Better, more responsive decisions
  • Improved customer service
  • Reduction of waste
  • More productive employees

Surprising as it may be, one of the most common reasons for product recall in North America, is related to improper labeling. Carlisle’s integrated solutions greatly reduce our clients recall risk by starting with an intelligent label design philosophy which manages label format and content, controls label deployment, provides 100% compliance verification and maximizes traceability via granular product serialization. Properly managed content, label design, and deployment along with increased traceability help to reduce our customers exposure to all of the risks associated with a product recall.

To address some of the Food Safety Challenges Facing Food Processors – we offer solutions for:

• Finished Goods Label Format & Content Management
• Tamper Proof Labeling
• Brand Protection Solutions
• Serialized Carton to Pallet Handling
• Country of Origin Labeling (COOL)
• Comprehensive Work-in-Process Tracking
• Packaging Material Consumption