Eckes-Granini Group GmbH is an independent privately-held German company known for its brand of fruit juices, which are available in 70 countries worldwide. It is headquartered in Nieder-Olm, with annual turnover of 827 million Euros.
The company mission is to bring the best fruit for a healthy and enjoyable life. Competent, committed employees, strong brands, and a long-term strategy devoted to sustainable value enhancements are pillars of strength at Eckes-Granini.
Some recent challenges the company was facing included:
- Wasted raw ingredients.
- Lack of real-time visibility into operations.
- Data-source integration throughout operations.
- Production interruption and unplanned downtime.
- Lack of accurate and real-time information to help operators with value-added operations.
TrakSYS™ from Parsec Automation Corp. was deployed to help address the facility’s needs.
“For us, it was important to maintain accurate electronic production records (ERPs) and keep track of critical process values to comply with the regulatory requirement related to food safety,” explains a production manager for Eckes-Granini. “With TrakSYS, we have been able to achieve both while improving the productivity and performance of our operations. The acceptance of the solution by the operators, production managers, and the quality department has been great.”
TrackSYS was deployed on a single server with operator interfaces for four production areas. Eleven EVENTTrak operator interface nodes throughout the facility enable interaction with the systems (e.g., visualization of KPIs and losses, downtime management, root cause analysis, quality data entry, safety check forms, and data contextualization). In addition, plant-wide user workstations view operations and performance information via standard browser technology.
One of the major advantages of TrakSYS was its ability to readily exchange data with the existing applications (SAP, WMS, SSCC, etc.) without having to modify the infrastructure. This made it possible to quickly deploy and gain access to operations-wide real-time data. Additionally, the team responsible for selecting the solution was impressed by the configurability of TrakSYS, and the support provided by Parsec and its certified partner, YPSYS.
There were several functional benefits that were realized quickly after the deployment:
- Operator buy-in, which allowed users to quickly become advocates of the system.
- TrakSYS facilitated communication between different shifts and crews, which has enhanced continuity of operations by eliminating unnecessary shift-change adjustments.
- Overall production performance was improved by more than 10 percent, while the percentage of overweight products (cost give-away) was reduced by 30 percent.
