Cream of the crop

Happy with its Siemens automation, dairy manufacturer Bulla has taken the next step and increased its plant efficiency even further.

Bulla Dairy Foods is an Australian-owned family company producing premium-quality dairy products. Since 1910, it has manufactured cheeses, yoghurts, and ice-creams in Colac, Victoria. Bulla Dairy Foods is one of Australia’s most recognised dairy brands and is also established in the Asia-Pacific region.

Monitoring and tracking challenge

Bulla Dairy Foods has 160 stockkeeping units (SKUs), of which 99% are manufactured in a seven-day cycle. This strenuous production cycle requires immense planning, execution, monitoring and documentation in order to achieve the required production quotas in a smooth process.

This demanding task was not made any easier by the company’s paper-based documentation system. Bulla realised the pressing need to develop a secure, reliable and efficient manufacturing execution system (MES). This system would streamline the documentation process, convert all systems to electronic format and provide data for strategic business management, enabling operators to easily manage production. Upgrading the system would also minimise disruptions and problems.

Upgrading production efficiency

Bulla Dairy Foods had already used Siemens technology in 2002 to automate its state-of-the-art chilled dairy plant. Because Bulla was extremely satisfied with Siemens’ programmable logic controllers and service, the company chose Siemens again to deliver the new MES. In particular, Bulla wanted to integrate the existing factory control system with the new MES system planned for the production process and knew that Siemens’ suite of technology solutions would make this migration easy.

Bulla was impressed with Siemens’ long-term view of the project. Siemens thoroughly assessed the company’s entire production plant, with particular focus on long-term benefits, cost-effectiveness and operational efficiency. Bulla found that Siemens’ detailed understanding of production philosophies was unparalleled in the industry.

Initially, Bulla committed to a pilot MES project that concentrated on the plant’s overall equipment effectiveness. If this pilot was successful, Bulla intended to use the software across the entire plant. The Simatic IT MES is a key means for manufacturers to optimise production while efficiently managing and improving the complete supply chain. More important, it does this in real time. Simatic IT harmonises and integrates all production processes by synchronising and simplifying them so that they are more flexible and effective.

Using Simatic IT also reduces island solutions, paper-related methods and nonstandard processes, while providing a seamless connection between production and business processes. It creates user-oriented key performance indicators (KPIs), making the production process more effective.

Versatile and easy-to-use reporting options

After a smooth installation, with Siemens providing on-site support and the flexibility to make last-minute changes, Bulla Dairy Foods was more than pleased with its new, world-class system. The new system was welcomed by everyone - from plant operators to maintenance employers and management - for its ease of use.

The newly installed Simatic IT system provides practical and useful reports, such as ‘Top Five Downtime Causes by Reason’ as well as customised reports specific to Bulla. One such customised report monitors production output against targets on a second-by-second basis, enabling the plant to identify areas of high and low production. Another mimics the former paper-based system so that enterprise resource planning-related data can be maintained.

With the completion of the pilot system, Bulla Dairy Foods was able to identify and rectify many longstanding downtime causes that had been hidden for years. The company managers can now see detailed and macro trends in their facility, which allows them to better identify problems and facilitate solutions.