Platform for the food and beverage industry
At Vandemoortele in Izegem, the digital transformation started from a concept: lights out factory. A catch-all concept, but the question that followed, how can you make this a reality, provided the little spark from which a lot of beauty emerged. An achievement that transformed the group's "ugly duckling" into a proud swan with the label "Factory of the Future.
Vandemoortele is and remains a household name within the Flemish food industry with a turnover of 1.4 billion euros and more than 4,000 employees spread over sites in twelve countries. The production site in Izegem has a very rich history. Fats have been produced there since the 19th century. Experience and knowledge make the production site the largest margarine factory in the group. But what should that plant look like in a few years? How can it remain competitive with all the challenges facing the food industry? Vandemoortele sought and found the answer in its sketch of its future lean production. The KAIZEN philosophy has become the common thread throughout the digitization process that the company outlined.
KAIZEN starts from the idea that every form of waste (time, raw materials, people ...) must be eliminated. An approach that wants to drive change from the production floor. At Vandemoortele, this concept was renamed C-flow, 'see the flow'. By making all production steps fit seamlessly into one another, they want to create added value. The division of twelve production lines into function of processes had to make way for a new organization that started from the product. A phase that was completed in 2018-2019 and led to a new outline. Now performance management was put under the microscope by starting to use all captured data for new optimizations. Shifts will henceforth be seen as a cascade. In between, a moment is provided for handover. At 10 a.m. every day there is a multidisciplinary meeting to discuss the most important KPIs. With this, Vandemoortele Izegem realized a feedback loop grafted onto a culture of continuous improvement.
Dashboards are now set up all along the production lines. They show the operators how well the line is performing. These factory dashboards were developed together with the employees to visualize just the info they need to make the right decisions. Line operators see the status and schedule in real-time and can thus determine where and when to make adjustments or when quality control can best be organized. In turn, the lab technicians responsible for quality control can see from predefined tolerances whether adjustments need to be made in production. Finally, the shift leader can monitor the performance of the machinery in real time. Insights that form the basis for daily multidisciplinary consultation. The knowledge and gut feeling of experienced employees is in fact made tangible in these dashboards and supported in black and white with data. A development that after its success in Izegem will now be spread throughout the group.
Important in this success story is the integrated approach. The digital tools that were added are contained in a larger system in which, for example, the MES and ERP packages also run. A fully digital factory that has the right data for the right quality. Yet it was the employees who were central to Vandemoortele's digital story. After all, they had the knowledge and experience necessary for success. After all, the technology introduced on the shop floor serves to make their lives easier. In his next digital steps forward, Vandemoortele wants to improve the work organization even further. There will be so-called cockpits. Instead of tying employees to a particular line, they will be able to see how best to use everyone's talent across the different lines based on the production schedule. That way, downtime could be easily accommodated and resolved.
