– This is our eighth project in the tobacco industry, modeled on the solution we previously applied in our client’s plants in Poland – says Tadeusz Dyduch, Apriso project manager.
The primary goal of the implementation in the South African plants is to improve logistics management in close connection with dynamically changing production demand. Krakow specialists faced a similar challenge at the BAT branch in Augustów, which, after taking over production from the West, began supplying all of Europe. This required increasing production capacity from 12 billion to over 30 billion cigarettes per year and increasing the number of variants from 100 to 600. The ERP system, by definition prepared for planning and managing stabilized production (e.g., when the same product is manufactured for a month), did not effectively support cases where the production time of a single batch had to be shortened from several days to several hours. Furthermore, the reaction to changes in current demand would take several to a dozen or so hours.
The branch in South Africa faced the same challenge. The implementation of Apriso will allow for reacting to changes and controlling production and logistics processes in real-time, i.e., at most within a few minutes of an event. Thanks to integration with machines and the use of portable terminals, the system goes deep, registering processes at the level of the rank-and-file employee. As a result, the flow of information between the “bottom” and the “top” is more complete and faster.
– This is a necessary condition for creating an effective mechanism for controlling current production, tracking consumed components and their efficient replenishment, and recording the full “genealogy” of products, i.e., the history of the finished product’s creation, including the identification of the supplier of each component – explains Tadeusz Dyduch.
There are many benefits to the implementation: the company can, among other things, monitor work efficiency in continuous mode, avoid delays caused by, for example, a failure on the production line or the use of incorrect raw materials and, consequently, the repetition of production. Such risks will be eliminated because operators will gain insight into processes in real-time, rather than at the end of the day or later. In addition to Augustów, these facilities are already used by BAT plants in Singapore, Brazil, Mexico, and now they will also be available in South Africa.
To date, Apriso has implemented over 650 MES systems, including at Ceramika Opoczno, Lek Polska, Amica Wronki, Saint Gobain Sekurit, Novelis, Lear, and British American Tobacco.