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Warburtons makes its data pay

13 July 2023

Suzanne Gill reports on how and why Warburtons is working towards utilising digitalised data to boost production yields and efficiency across multiple production sites.

Many food producers are now looking at ways to digitise their standard operating procedures in a bid to ensure more consistent product quality and to identify cost and waste saving opportunities. Traditionally, food manufacturers have generally relied on manual data gathering processes, with data being captured in excel spreadsheets and written down in many different forms. Today, there is a growing understanding about the need to digitise this process to enable the creation of standard operating procedures, based on accurate data that gives operators and engineers greater visualisation of their processes, helping them reduce the propensity for errors and improve overall quality.

One organisation that is on such a digitisation journey is Warburtons. It has deployed AVEVA System Platform software to collect data from production lines both old and new as part of an enterprise-wide digital transformation journey. Implemented with the help of NeoDyne, a certified Schneider Electric Alliance Integration Partner and Aveva Endorsed partner, and using analytics technology developed by AVEVA (a Schneider Electric company), Warburtons is able to capture, record and report on real-time process data. 

AVEVA System Platform is designed to break down silos and provide a unified, real-time view of facilities, with the aim of achieving better system design and maintenance, more agile decision making and more efficient, flexible and profitable manufacturing. 

Warburtons started its data digitalisation journey several years ago in a bid to improve   sustainability and efficiency. “We embarked on a couple of projects at our Wakefield site – low-scale data capture exercises built on the back of our existing SCADA platform ¬– before making the decision to move to a larger trial using AVEVA’s System Platform, with the help of NeoDyne,” explained David Rimmer, Manufacturing Excellence Director at Warburtons.

The model that Warburtons is moving forward with – which will eventually be rolled out across all six of its bread production sites in the UK – is a standalone data acquisition system, separate from its supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. The project has been justified based on potential improvements of 5% in yield in bread-slicing operations to achieve the necessary return on investment (ROI) for the project.
 
“We wanted to be able to create a set of tools that would give us greater insight into areas of our processes that could be improved, which would enable more sustainable production, and which would also enable us to ensure product consistency,” continued David. “With the AVEVA/Schneider solution we can put visuals onto the shop floor to give operators greater insight into potential problems before they pose a major production issue. The system also provides operators with insight into what they need to do to rectify a problem. In addition to providing a much better shop floor experience for operators, the solution also puts a lot of valuable process data into a historian which allows us to create reports over longer periods of time and gives us greater insight into longer-term trends which can help highlight problem areas in the plant and even streamline the commissioning of new plants,” said David.

Liam Deasy, MES Business Lead at NeoDyne, takes up the story: “It is important not to try to take on too much too soon. Warburtons has sensibly decided to take a step-by-step approach to its digital transformation. The data capture solution happily sits in the background and does not affect the production control system, so there is no change in workflow, yet operators are gaining rich contextual data which enables them to better perform their tasks on the production line.”

Creating KPIs
Discussing the system design, Liam continued: “Warburtons are the process experts here and knew where to collect the most valuable production data from. Warburtons wanted to keep information concise and so created nine business specific KPIs by area  – putting these onto a dashboard so engineers and operators can visualise them in real time, allowing them to see immediately if something is moving out of specification, giving them time to identify the root cause of a problem and apply corrective action in a timely manner.”

For each of the nine KPIs, Warburtons highlighted ten influencing factors that would most likely affect each KPI and data from the assets relating to these influencing factors was collected.

The solution has initially been deployed at Warburtons bread plant in Wakefield. The next step was to deploy it at the bagel plant in Stockton, featuring similar visuals on the plant floor but with different metrics. “We intend to roll the solution out through all the other bread plants,” explained David. “However, before we do, it is first necessary for our operational technology teams to ensure that the sites all have had the necessary upgrades to allow the data to be acquired and saved. Our aim is that the KPIs will be similar across all six sites – maybe with a few subtle nuances. We want the solution to be as close to a standardised and templatised solution as it can be.” 

Having a set of KPIs across the enterprise will allow Warburtons to hold functions to account – for example, because bread height is a critical parameter this has been built into the model and is one of the nine key metrics that is visualised on the shop floor. Operator terminals contain the same visuals which allows operators to quickly identify the most likely reasons that the parameters may be straying from the norm, helping ensure that problems can be quickly identified and rectified. 

“We spent a great deal of time identifying the KPIs and building up the visuals,” continued David.  “While we may not get it exactly right in the first iteration of the solution, we want to roll out version one through all the plants before any big changes are made. Once everyone is comfortable working with the system we may make changes to the metrics at an enterprise level, to effectively create version two of the system in the future. The backend of the system is tightly managed so that changes to the influencing factors for the KPIs can only be made by authorised team members.  

“Our priority, however, is to get all the sites using the system correctly and seeing some benefits first before we move further forward with any future versions.  We need to start unlocking benefits and gaining insight into new areas to focus on in the future by getting operators to build a list of the things they might want included in future versions of the system.”

What benefits has Warburtons seen so far? “The pilot project has been operating at our Wakefield plant for around two years now,” said David. “We monitor all our bread plants and the Wakefield plant, traditionally, has always been a middle performer.  However, the plant has been the top performer for two years running now – I don’t think this is a coincidence.” 

IT/OT collaboration
The data capture solution does require a degree of collaboration between the Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) teams and David explained that, traditionally Warburtons IT team has handled all the technology, other than that relating to the SCADA system at site level. “We have a well-established IT department and have put more OT resource into the business during the data capture project. The IT and OT teams are working well together – we have a set of established OT standards, the boundaries are clear and we are working to them.” 

Offering advice to other food processors considering implementing a solution to utilise digital production data, Liam advises that plant operators end users should be actively involved in creating the front end of the process. “Although they may not technically know how the data collection and analysis system works, they will have the best understanding of the plant’s operational KPIs and will ultimately be responsible for driving value out of the system, so it is vital that they are fully engaged with the process and are involved from the design phase.”

David added: “It is also important to have people around you who have previous experience, NeoDyne has been instrumental to the success of our project. Also, it’s important to take the time and see what other organisations are doing – we were invited into other facilities to see what  various solutions can achieve, which gave us confidence in our own plans, and confidence that the project will deliver for us. We will also create training material for our operators and aim to integrate this into existing and new meeting occasions using the new data to ensure maximum user engagement.”

Giving just a taste of the benefits that the system can bring, David pointed to a new energy reduction project that Warburtons has recently started working on that will add to its sustainability agenda and cost performance. “This project was identified when we looked at trends on our historised data which identified an erratic trend and a problem asset. This is a project that will be replicated across the rest of the group, and we would never have identified the issue without the benefit of historised data and the visualisation capabilities that we now have.” 

In conclusion, both Liam and David pointed out that digitalisation is not an end point for food processors, instead it is an ongoing process. Software platforms, such as the AVEVA System Platform, act as the core of the solution, connecting to process equipment and assets on the plant floor and soaking up as much data as possible. “Warburtons now has an ever-growing core set of production data that can be extracted, manipulated and presented in context in whatever way works best for us,” concluded David. “The solution will inform our improvement agenda for many years to come, and it will evolve to help us keep up with our future priorities.”


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