When Coca-Cola Amatil began building its new $57 million manufacturing facility at Eastern Creek, Plaut IT was tasked with the challenge of integrating CCA’s overseas equipment suppliers’ systems to SAP. Anne Widjaja reports.
Background
In May 2011, Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) commenced construction of its new PET preform and closure facility at Eastern Creek, Sydney. The facility would produce PET bottle preforms and closures which would be used by the company to make its own bottles in-house on production lines within its facilities.
The process of making bottles involves the manufacture of plastic bottle closures (caps) and PET resin ‘preforms’, which are test-tube shaped moulds used to manufacture CCA’s plastic beverage bottles. The preforms are fed into high-tech PET bottle self-manufacture or ‘blow-fill’ machines so bottles can be blown and manufactured to CCA’s specific design. The new bottles being made by “blowfill” are all lighter in weight because less PET plastic is used, resulting in a reduction of 22 per cent in the carbon footprint of each bottle. The challenge that had to be overcome was the linking of CCA’s facility systems with a number of overseas equipment suppliers. These suppliers held integral but different roles in the factory control system.
Michael Shirbin, major project manager, CCA, explained that the challenge was integrating these divergent roles with the manufacturing processes in the Eastern Creek facility. “We needed an SAP middleware system to capture all of the information and details from the various equipment, and present it so we could visualise it and see it on one screen,” Shirbin says.
Plaut IT was brought in to the project to create this SAP middleware system to enable communications horizontally and vertically across the various CCA equipment suppliers. Plaut identified that the SAP Manufacturing Intelligence Integration (MII) solution would be perfect for the job, with its capability to integrate suppliers, vendors and customers across the supply chain and automating systems to effectively streamline manufacturing capabilities. Having had previous experience implementing the MII solution for other manufacturers, Plaut was tasked with the challenge of designing and building an MII system for CCA.
Implementation and challenges
Over six weeks, between August and September 2011, the team at Plaut designed a fully customised MII solution for CCA. The requirement at the Eastern Creek facility was to take process orders generated by SAP and carry them to the injection moulding machines, so that they were able to make the preforms according to CCA parameters. Plaut had to collaboratively create interface documentation with overseas third party vendors so that orders could be fully carried out at the Eastern Creek facility. This documentation outlined how information would be exchanged between MII and the vendor systems. Once this was determined, MII collected the information from vendors for display on an electronic dashboard. Plant operators were then able to check the dashboard to see how the systems were operating, even if they were remotely located.
John Broadbent, national solution lead, manufacturing integration for Plaut, said the MII solution, for example, enabled bins filled with preforms to be transported to different locations in the production line. MII would schedule laserguided vehicles to pick up the bins, and would scan serialised barcodes on the bins to evaluate what part of the production process they were at. These barcodes contained details such as what line the bin had come from, how many preforms were in it and what SAP process order it was made against. MII then created the production receipt automatically for SAP. The toughest challenge that Plaut faced in the implementation was meeting the strict delivery schedule that CCA had set out. Broadbent said it was “hard and fast”, and Plaut also had to undertake parallel programming of various parts of the MII solution – a task that they’d never done before.
“As that programme got more and more compressed, we had to become more clever in the way that we did things,” Broadbent says.
Due to the business-critical timing of the implementation, it was crucial that a robust and thorough testing regime for the solution was developed before the Plaut team was able to start working on-site. This regime enabled an extremely tight commissioning window.
“We only got site network communication on the first day, and by 4pm the next day we were able to produce their first preforms in the injection moulding machines,” Broadbent says. Plaut successfully designed a modular horizontal and vertical communication system using MII, with a total of 23 different interfaces, user management screens and system monitoring. The Plaut team also managed to effectively link CCA’s multitude of vendor-supplied systems with SAP. In October, Plaut commenced the system build and installation of the MII system for CCA. Subsequently, CCA was able to integrate the whole plant seamlessly without human interaction.
Business benefits
Shirbin has since reported that the MII solution has worked “very well”.
“Like anything you do have some issues, but we’re all confident that it’s going to be a valuable solution,” he says. For CCA, the greatest success of the project has been the ability to view all the manufacturing systems in the Eastern Creek Facility in an easily accessible user management screen. Shirbin compared the old system at the facility, where “if we wanted to know how the compressors were going we would have to go and look at them”, to the convenience of the fully functioning MII system.
“Now we have all that information coming to us, I can sit here in the office and on my computer screen see how they are all working,” he says.
Although communicating with overseas vendors was one of the greatest challenges of the project, Broadbent said that all the vendors actually “worked exceptionally well together”. “Fortunately vendor politics didn’t enter into the project at all – it was very easy to come up with a resolution without having to spend weeks debating or discussing or going back to every country to try and get those results.” Shirbin says that since reaping the benefits of the centralised communication system at the Eastern Creek facility, CCA would be likely to “go down a similar path” when rolling out other manufacturing facilities in the future. Plaut has already been commissioned to work on enhancements to the existing solution, providing CCA with additional functionality to improve quality management processes at the new facility.
