Primavera Naturkorn GmbH, based in Mühldorf in Upper Bavaria, was founded in 1990 from the roller mill that was shut down in the 1980s. The mill’s centuries-old tradition dates back to the 15th century. The medium-sized company now employs 55 people and has an annual turnover of €35 million. In 2011, the time-consuming and error-prone order planning in Excel was to be replaced by a fully automated planning system. The new system provides precise information on delivery dates to customers and drastically shortens planning times for Production Planning.
As a manufacturer of high-quality cereal products, Primavera Naturkorn supplies a wide range of customers, including the food industry, food retailers, feed manufacturers, wholesalers and the milling and baking industry. The company has focussed around 45% of its business on children’s food manufacturers. Thanks to its broad product range, which includes gluten-containing and gluten-free products, Primavera Naturkorn can fulfil individual customer requirements. As an ISO 9001-certified company, Primavera Naturkorn obtains its raw materials from associations such as Demeter, Bioland and Naturland, all of which guarantee food from controlled organic cultivation and the highest quality. Primavera Naturkorn obtains its grain from fields cultivated exclusively for it in order to fulfil the strict requirements of children’s food production in particular and to be able to guarantee residue-free production.
Complex Silo Problem
To minimise cleaning times and avoid unacceptable contamination, the Primavera Naturkorn mill has a total of eight different grain-specific production lines, spread across 30 machines and over 200 silos. With more than 800 products, some of which have to be produced in batches, Production Planning is no easy task. “In April 2011, we came up with the idea of replacing the very time-consuming and error-prone order planning in Excel with an optimisation-based, fully automated planning system,” recalls Sebastian Huber, one of the managing directors of Primavera Naturkorn… “After looking at a number of professional planning systems, we realised that our requirements were considerably more complex than those of most other production companies. In addition to the need to include material availability at batch level, it was the silos between our plants that caused the various providers considerable problems in mapping our planning. FASTEC was the only provider who was confident that they could solve this problem,” continues Sebastian Huber. The Paderborn-based IT company FASTEC offers, among other things, the modular Manufacturing Execution System (MES) FASTEC 4 PRO, whose individual modules – such as Planning, Machine Data Acquisition, Traceability etc. – can also be used as stand-alone solutions. Josef Gaigl, also Managing Director of Primavera Naturkorn, is impressed and adds: “We were also impressed by the large number of existing functions in FASTEC 4 PRO. This meant that we could be sure that we would be able to rely on proven and quickly integrated MES modules in the future if we wanted to expand.”
Introduction of the Planning System
The joint project began in March 2012. After the interface to the existing ERP system MKS Goliath was successfully implemented within a few weeks, the special programming for the silo problem was tackled. The silo or container problem is as follows: the grain is conveyed in one of several possible silos in batches between the operations of cleaning, hulling, grinding and packaging. It remains there until the silo has been emptied again by its subsequent operation. The respective process can therefore only continue with the next operation when at least one of its downstream silos is empty. In contrast to classic production, it can therefore happen that a system is blocked and cannot produce… However, after carrying out the first test runs, we quickly noticed some inconsistencies. Master data errors that had gone unnoticed for years became immediately apparent when we looked at the planning results in the graphical control centre,” recalls Sebastian Huber. Parallel to the commissioning of the planning system, an interface to the existing production data acquisition system was set up. This provides the control centre with real-time information on order progress and faults, which can be incorporated directly into the next planning run.
Another special feature of a mill is the fact that it is mostly a case of co-production. For example, husking produces by-products that are also temporarily stored in silos. However, unlike the main products, these by-products or co-products, which are also used in animal feed production, cannot be planned in batches. The planning logic must therefore always ensure that a silo is first completely filled and then emptied again as quickly as possible… FASTEC also proved to be a flexible partner for this requirement, which only materialised during the course of the project, and was able to deliver a solution within a short space of time,” summarises Sebastian Huber.
The system has now been used daily by Primavera Naturkorn since the beginning of 2013. Sebastian Huber sees the biggest advantages in the fact that, in addition to the drastically reduced planning time required each day to generate the Production Planning, it is also possible to make more reliable statements about delivery dates to customers. “In addition, possible delays are visualised immediately, so that our customers can be informed or notified more quickly,” says Sebastian Huber with satisfaction. The use of the new planning system is also noticeable thanks to reduced setup times and shorter order throughput times.
Into the future with MES
“Like all energy-intensive companies in Germany, we are also faced with documenting our energy consumption in accordance with ISO 50001. We had been looking for a suitable system for this for months. A few weeks ago, we had already decided on a specialised, stand-alone system for recording energy consumption. When we then realised that FASTEC also offers such an MES module, we revised our decision and are now planning to implement it with FASTEC within the next four months. The big advantage for us is that the energy monitoring is then seamlessly integrated into our existing FASTEC 4 PRO system. This means that we can not only use the flexible online monitoring, but can even report the energy consumption per item or per Production order,” says Josef Gaigl, looking forward to the next joint project.