Aptean Process Manufacturing OEE in Action: Bakery Client Improves Results with Real-Time Intelligence

As anyone who works at a food and beverage manufacturing business will tell you, mistakes are inevitable. In any production run, there will be a few items that roll off the line that are imperfect or flawed in some critical way that necessitates scrapping them as rejects and chalking up the loss to the “price of doing business.”

As the saying goes, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Or, in the case of an Aptean client specializing in gluten-free baked goods, you can’t bake bread without a few loaves turning out bad.

In this specific circumstance, the client had set up an imaging device to detect any foreign material, fragments of metal or large open cavities inside their bread loaves as they moved down a conveyer. Any that were found to be compromised had to be scrapped, and all of the loaves within 10 feet either way along the line also had to be rejected out of caution.

While this in and of itself wasn’t a major concern, what was a problem was the lack of insight that the company had into how often loaves had to be rejected and what the root causes of the defects were. That prevented them from forming a strategy to mitigate the losses or correct the underlying flaws in processes or machinery.

Enter Aptean Process Manufacturing Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Our solution is designed to give manufacturers of all varieties the shop floor intelligence they need to make informed decisions with agility and assuredness.

Because our system is able to interface with just about any equipment than can send an electronic signal, the client was able to leverage the Performance module to automatically track how many loaves were scrapped and the reasons for the rejections in real time via various dashboards. In turn, that information could be piped into the platform’s Analytics module, which could identify dependencies and related events with Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI).

This extra level of visibility helped the business trace back to the issue that caused the defect, be it a flawed ingredient mixing method or insufficient cleaning procedures between shifts. From there, our OEE’s Improve module was used to implement and manage continuous improvement campaigns geared toward permanently rectifying the problem and preventing avoidable losses in the future.

The client was thrilled with the results that Aptean Process Manufacturing OEE was able to produce for them. With a purpose-built, best-in-class solution on their side, they could get back to doing what they do best—making the best gluten-free baked goods.

More to Love with Aptean Process Manufacturing OEE

Our robust process manufacturing OEE software was developed to suit companies across a wide spectrum of industries, from food and beverage to chemicals, cosmetics and nutraceuticals. With immediate feedback on performance, users of our platform are able to really get to the bottom of what’s working well and what’s not so that they can commit to on-time, in-full delivery with confidence.

Aptean Process Manufacturing OEE also helps organizations tackle the complex matter of compliance, as the dedicated Quality module manages the documentation process in a streamlined, paperless fashion. With a complete suite of statistical process control (SPC) tools and an intuitive user experience, the information your staff need will be just a few clicks or prompts away.

We also offer flexible cloud deployments of the platform for those businesses looking for the ultimate lightweight model, and the out-of-the-box functionality lets you hit the ground running and optimize plan attainment in no time. The labor planning and tracking features also offer complete control over your costs and scheduling so you’ve never got concerns over your crew.

And there’s still more, with automated data collection, end-to-end yield tracking and reporting on sanitation, changeover and clean-in-progress (CIP) times, all of which help you understand your effectiveness and shore up any deficiencies in your critical processes. Finally, it’s all backed by teams of dedicated professionals with decades of collective experience and in-depth technological know-how.

So, if you’re ready to learn more about Aptean Process Manufacturing OEE and what it can do for your manufacturing company, contact us today. We also offer personalized demos so you can see the solution live.