Dairy giant Clover SA has reduced the costs of labour and production at its Oueensburgh plant in KwaZulu-Natal in line with international standards through the implementation of the asset performance management system, ON KEY APMS. The system was designed and implemented by asset performance management specialist PRAGMA AFRICA.
In the face of burgeoning globalisation and the pressure of stiff international competition with SA`s dairy industry, Clover, one of the largest producers of milk, butter, cheese and fruit juice in the country, recognised the need to focus on performance management in order to achieve increasingly higher quality standards.
The company selected the Steri department of its Queensburgh plant for the implementation of the ON KEY APMS solution following the introduction of a total productive maintenance (TPM) philosophy in 2000 as a management tool making way for the company`s new focus and direction.
"The timing of the implementation was ideal: the Steri factory had a history of low performance and we were in the process of upgrading the Super M and Steimel products to reposition them in the marketplace," says Dave Mitchell, industrial engineer at Clover.
The ON KEY APMS software is an asset performance management tool used predominantly in the manufacturing industry to measure, report and analyse the performance of production lines. The measurements consider five main variables: availability, performance rate, quality, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and overall plant performance (OPP).
One of the pertinent aspects of the ON KEY implementation was the training of staff in the Steri department on the OEE methodology, the identification by the production and maintenance teams of the causes of the Steri line downtime, and the development of a log sheet for capturing shift data.
The data sheets are now reviewed at daily production/maintenance meetings and the data logged into the ON KEY software where reports and trends analyses are easily accessible.
Repetitive failures can be identified at the push of a button and the system can be accessed by multiple users on the LAN or WAN networks.
"ON KEY has been valuable as a recording system, producing graphic representation for the actual performance issues team leaders face," says Mitchell. "Getting the machine users to enter their own data and generate reports has removed management from the loop so that team leaders can see the effects of good or bad events directly."
Since the implementation of ON KEY, the Steri factory has enjoyed continuous improvement in OEE from 40% to a sustained weekly level of 65%. Performance has improved up to 20% and availability as much as 30% with the focus that the recording system gives to the improvement programmes.
"The success in the Steri factory has enabled rollout of ON KEY to 10 other production lines," says Steve Leech, PRAGMA regional manager, Coastal.
The main benefits achieved by the Queensburgh plant also include a reduction in labour costs and in production cost per unit, a more motivated and committed team, the sharing of a vision towards a common goal, and management`s confidence that decisions can be made on sound and accurate information, supported at all levels.
"The introduction of OEE as a measurement concept, the utilisation of TPM as a management philosophy and the ability of the team leaders to record and report on their progress has given ownership of the improvement process to those directly affected," says Mitchell.
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