Page 35 - Packaging News Magazine May-June 2018

May-June 2018
www.packagingnews.com.au
INDUSTRY 4.0
END-TO-END SOLUTIONS
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Foodmach specialises in systems integration, and has nurtured in-house expertise in information-driven manufacturing, be it IoT, IIoT, M2M or Industry 4.0, using industry standards such as OMAC PackML. Commenting on the installation at the new Dulux facility, project director Kevin Worrell says: “To be able to integrate with overseas equipment, and combine all that together to make a whole line work as one is really quite remarkable, given the different programming methods... [it has] been a fantastic outcome.
“Industry 4.0 is the future. Foodmach are right at the cutting edge... [they are] a great partner to take you on that journey,” Worrell says.
This is considered one of the top five Industry 4.0 plants in the world...we couldn’t achieve what we needed to achieve if we didn’t go down that path.”
LONG TIME COMING
At the start of the project, Worrell re- lates, the company had no idea what it was looking for in a solution.
“All we knew is that we needed to allow for the future,” Worrell says.
“I think that we had an opportuni- ty to really start with blank canvas. It takes a brave organisation to first of all be able to jump in and do that, and I mean both from the client side and a supplier side, because the risks are extraordinary. So there was a level of trust that had to be formed between all the different team players.”
The DuluxGroup planning team took its inspiration from the food and dairy industry, and considered how it could adapt current best practice to the Dulux operations. The team invit- ed key integration suppliers to the FMCG and dairy industries to tender. Emily Wright, technical sales man- ager for Foodmach, says: “The Mer- rifield project took many years of collaboration – Dulux first contact- ed us in August 2011. Working with
a range of suppliers in a cohesive team saw the first of the lines re- alised in the latter half of 2017 with the remainder fully installed in ear- ly 2018. It was a six-year sales pro- cess with nine in-depth quotes.
“We came close to losing the proj- ect at one stage, when Dulux re- alised an entire paint line could be imported for around $1.5 million. However, the imported lines were not flexible enough to cater for the vast array of SKUs required.”
Worrell adds: “We’d looked over- seas but we couldn’t come up with the solution that compared to what Foodmach has given us.”
For instance, according to Wor- rell, the depalletiser solution that Foodmach delivered was so good, Dulux purchased a second one.
RETURN ON INVESMENT
“It’s hard to justify as an investment when you’re doing it up front,” Wor- rell explains, “but now we’re doing it, we’re seeing advantages... getting it right first time, no wrong batches going through... little things that we’ve got control over now.”
“It’s allowed us to eliminate a lot of physical labour, it’s allowed us to give metrics feedback data. We’re still re- ally just coming out of commission- ing, and what we’re mining out of our recipes is allowing us to refine them to get more accurate, giving our cus- tomers a better product, down to not having a mismatch of labels with rec- ipes, so our can systems are inter- locked,” Worrell says.
MEASURING UP
Worrell says the best key metric for this project is that it was completed on time and within budget. Another is the flexibility of the new plant.
“We’ve got, probably, 200 raw mate- rials that are handled without manu- al intervention. We’ve got 300 recipes that are manufactured in the plant that we can change if we need to. And the filling lines can handle about 1400 SKUs... just consider... we’ve got 15L metal containers... 15L plastic containers plastic, we’ve got 1L con- tainers, and we’ve got everything in between. That’s what this plant can do. And that’s pretty damn good.”
FUTURE PROOFING
The Dulux brand’s core purpose is to help customers to ‘Imagine a bet- ter place’, and one way it’s doing this is via a smartphone app, which enables the consumer to combine a photo of a wall in their home with a chosen colour, and ‘paint’ the wall to see the outcome before purchase.
“[By extension] imagine that if you press a button, it places the or- der for the right amount of paint that goes straight to the batch plant, which manufactures it on demand. It’s then packaged up and delivered to your home or to the nearest Bun- nings store... well that’s all in the fu- ture – but our plant’s actually capa- ble of doing that now.”
For Dulux, the Merrifield project’s success has demonstrated how im- plementing an Industry 4.0 facility opens up opportunities for growth and product innovation on a scale not previously possible. ■
MAIN: The company required a solution that would allow it to step into the next generation of paint technology and innovation.
LEFT: Product
is packaged in varying sized steel and plastic containers ranging from
1L to 15L in capacity.