With 200 product lines blended, packaged and distributed from its plant, and with an expanding customer base, Organica knew it was time to change the way it did things.
It was still using manual systems to manage its major operations, creating significant administration to keep track of orders, production and stock.
“Our planning systems were manual, outdated, inaccurate, time consuming and no longer able to cope with our current level of business,” Noel explained. It was a constant source of stress when disruptions in production arose.
“Controlling and minimising the downtimes in production due to material shortages had become an issue for some time.
“To facilitate further growth and maintain high quality for discerning customers, we needed to implement tighter control on our production and management processes.”
Understanding where the optimisation and control opportunities lie requires good quality live data and analysis. Digital transformation became essential.
Made Smarter’s digital transformation workshop helped Organica identify potential digital tools to solve its key business challenges and create a digital roadmap.
“Sitting down with an advisor to focus on our main issues was very valuable,” Noel said. “The key challenges were the need to enhance productivity on the filling lines by optimising the blending processes, as well as improve our packaging lines. We needed to automate data collection from the machinery, process and store it. We could then find ways of improving the efficiency, speed it up and increase productivity.
“Then we needed to connect our operations to enable forecasting and order placement, availability of raw materials, order processing, production scheduling, batch production, storage, distribution and cost management.”