Integrated plant and business intelligence help Brouwerij Martens to increase efficiency

Highly volatile market

Privately owned since 1758 and based in Bocholt, Belgium, Brouwerij Martens is the fourth largest brewer in the country, producing 10 basic beers within a portfolio of 200 finished products. Annual production reaches 1.5 million hectolitres, 80% of which is for export.

The company has a business strategy to be the lowest cost producer in the highly volatile private label market. This market is characterised by high volumes, low margins and constantly changing customer requirements, especially with regard to packaging. This is a challenging environment, with a need to combine cost efficiency with product quality in order to achieve product differentiation.

Brouwerij Martens had a number of issues it wanted to address in order to improve overall efficiency. These included:

• Increased business and production efficiency
• Reduced time to market for new products by means of improved plant flexibility and faster internal communication
• Transparency of end product cost structures
• Fast, accurate and comprehensive management information based on plant and business systems intelligence
• Integration with vendors and customers, from the process plant through to the supply chain
• Collaborative production systems and technology standardisation resulting in collaborative commerce
• Traceability at all stages of the production, processing and distribution cycles, according to EU regulation 178/2002

According to Jan Martens, Logistics Director at Brouwerij Martens, "To achieve these needs, we were looking for real-time, accurate reflections of operational results that would enable us to make proper business decisions. We needed a system that could model the fully integrated value chain, from the truck carrying malt to supply the brewery, to the unit of finished product that leaves the warehouse, to a customer."

The Business (ERP) System

In order to meet their needs, Brouwerij Martens decided to work with Invensys to implement their business and production strategy in three phases.

Phase 1

The first phase involved a Protean ERP system supplied by Invensys Marcam to deliver horizontal integration of the business processes across a wide range of functions. These included production planning, purchasing, manufacturing, product costing and quality control, recipe management, sales and financials.

For example, Martens bases their production schedule on sales forecasts eight weeks ahead. This requires a clear preview of raw materials and packaging requirements. By accessing data via Protean, the brewery is able to optimise stock levels, capacity and manpower.

According to Paul Bloemen, Director ICT for Brouwerij Martens, "Drilling down to the functional benefits of Protean, we have seen significant advantages in optimised inventory levels, integration of our beer planning processes, and the ability to easily handle co- and by-products and recycled products. We have also been able to monitor the process (brewing, fermentation) and discrete (packaging) operations – all in the same system. This has meant that we have been able to reduce our overall inventory value by up to 30 percent and achieve a flow of better and faster management information. In combination with a better planning system, this has helped us significantly improve customer service."

Contributing to this was the Protean Production Model, which is specifically designed for use in the food and beverage industries. It provides advanced process characteristics in order to define production standards, plan capacity and material requirements, define production rates, model costs, and measure performance. This is achieved by combining formula or recipe requirements and operational information into a single model. Furthermore, its flexible market and tax-profiles allow food and beverage industry requirements such as returnable packaging, excise duties and taxes to be defined and easily maintained by simply changing the configuration.

The Plant-Floor Production System

Phase 2

The second phase of the Martens strategy was the plant-floor renovation and its seamless integration with the Protean ERP system. The existing process automation systems in the brewhouse, fermentation and maturation, filtration and the filling areas have been assembled over time, with equipment from different suppliers containing disparate automation systems of varying vintages.

All the production data still had to be manually entered into the Protean ERP system, which did not provide the required consistency and completeness.

The renovation has been completed in the brewhouse and there are plans to extend into the fermentation/maturation and to the filtration areas. The filling lines are partially new, but they must be integrated into a collaborative manufacturing environment with a common nomenclature.

Brewery Martens identified the following objectives for the new plant-floor system:

• Modernise process control system to reduce exposure to risk arising from loss of production
• Address shortcomings in the areas of continuity, manageability, functionality and maintainability
• Increase flexibility and capacity
• Integrate Protean ERP system with the plant-floor production system based on ISA S95 standards
• Execute automatic download of production schedules from the ERP system
• Automatic upload of production performance (volume, consumption, equipment usage)
• Accurate registration of all material usage to guarantee faultless lot traceability and tracking
• Creation of a batch reporting system to allow further integration with management reporting anddata warehousing

Brouwerij Martens selected APV to handle the plant-floor renovation of the brewhouse, because of its unique combination of automation, controls and process know-how, which together can merge the distinct disciplines of ERP, plant-floor control and process expertise into a single solution.

Another reason behind Martens´™ choice was the Invensys´™ ArchestrA® industrial automation and information software architecture.

At the heart of the APV solution is the Wonderware® Industrial Application Server, which is built on the ArchestrA® architecture. The Industrial Application Server created a plant-wide infrastructure, which allows Brouwerij Martens to deploy solutions based on ArchestrA® technology - initially in the brewhouse and ultimately throughout the complete plant, including the filling lines.

System Architecture

The ArchestrA® software architecture organises and displays information, which translates into actions that improve scheduling, recipe handling, product quality, plant throughput, availability and flexibility. It also facilitates preventive maintenance and reduces cleaning costs.

That’s where the APV Production Server adds value - it combines APV´™s in-depth process know-how with the infrastructure of the Industrial Application Server. The result is a suite of software tools, which provide intelligence to improve plant performance.

According to Paul Bloemen, "The APV Production Server allows us to reduce the long-term cost of ownership of our enterprise. By starting in the brewhouse, we can scale up to other areas and ultimately incorporate the complete plant into a unified infrastructure, which mirrors our business systems and allows them to communicate easily and flexibly. It also ensures long-term investment security."

The diagramillustrates the Martens Production Server Architecture.

The APV Production Server contains a scalable set of highly functional solutions. For Brouwerij Martens, the following components were used:

• Batch Management & Reporting based on Wonderware´™s InBatchâ„¢ software
• Visualisation and Event/Alarm Management based on Wonderware´™sInTouch® HMI software
• Reporting for Brewers, Quality Management and Production Planning using Wonderware’s ActiveFactoryâ„¢ reporting and analysis tools
• Wonderware´™s Industrial Application Server
• Wonderware´™s IndustrialSQL Serverâ„¢ historian
• Microsoft´™s SQL Server
• Microsoft´™s BizTalk® 2004 server as middleware between business and production systems
• ISA S95 Services to provide standardise communication between the ERP and plant-floor systems

Integrating the plant-floor with the rest of the business had been a struggle for some time. Based on the ISA S95 working group standards (also in process as ISO/IEC-62264), Invensys has developed a standardised interface using XML messages between the Business/ERP system, Microsoft® BizTalk 2004 server and the APV Production Server. The S95 standard paves the way for easier collaborative production management, using consistent models and language across all industries. For Brouwerij Martens, this reduces costs, risk and errors in communication. It also provides a sustainable solution that the customer can expand and grow with.

Batch Management System

Based on the S88 standard, the Batch Management System is designed to model the brewhouse equipment and its process capabilities. It makes it possible to develop or refine recipes for new products very rapidly without modification to the PLC programmes. Production schedules and their required resources (material and equipment), as planned in Martens´™ ERP system, are automatically downloaded and inserted into the Batch Management schedules to start at the planned time, based on optimum equipment availability.

During execution, the Batch Management system is capable of managing the simultaneous execution of several batches. It also records all batch processing activity in the MS SQL Server database of the APV Production Server, enabling the creation of production reports. A graphical user interface provides the necessary information and guidance for the operators and allows very flexible recipe handling.

Control System

The Business System and the new Production System represent a perfect illustration of latest trends in the industry. Consequently, Brouwerij Martens opted for PC-based control (Soft PLC) to replace the traditional PLCs and provide tight integration with the existing IT and APV Production Server infrastructure. Three Invensys® Intelligent Integrator Soft PLCs control the brewhouse, using standard IEC 61131-3 programming languages. The Intelligent Integrator is a rugged industrial PC in a compact magnetic interference-protected housing that supports DIN rail mounting. Using the S88 standard for Batch Management and PLC control follows the trend in the process industries and provides:

• A structured approach with a common terminology for all team members
• Greater flexibility of plant equipment resources
• A modular and object-oriented approach for the development of structured, robust applications
• Ease of maintenance

Lot tracing and tracking

Batch oriented lot tracing and tracking is an embedded feature inside the Batch Management System. It is seamlessly integrated and synchronised with the Protean ERP system, which does the supply-chain wide tracking and tracing, with the emphasis on transactions. All batch information, including events, process data, production information, material usage, operator comments and actions, as well as equipment used to produce the associated batch and all batch-related process alarms are logged. This data is used for flexible reporting, including detailed production and genealogy reports. It provides a web-based interface for any computer connected on the Brouwerij Martens enterprise network.

Martens´™ taste for innovation continues, as it becomes the first brewing company to invest in the mass production of barrier PET bottles. Producing 180-million bottles a year, it will be the world´™s largest beer-packaging unit for barrier PET bottles. With the APV Production Server and ArchestrA® software architecture, Martens will be able to integrate these new ventures smoothly and efficiently.

Phase 3

Finally, in future, Martens aims to extend the functionality beyond the internal operation to external partners, such as suppliers and customers, providing seamless solutions from the process to the supply chain.

Added-value solutions

The system provided to Brouwerij Martens delivered the following added-value solutions:

• Integrated beer production planning.
• Tight integration of logistics, production and financials to deliver real-time inventory valuation, improved inventory turns and tighter manufacturing capacity utilisation.
• Real-time plant intelligence, such as costing per production run, updated stock levels, and products consumed and produced.
• Monitoring and analysis of brewery characteristics, including by-products, recycled products, returnable packaging, and excise and other taxes.
• Full traceability according to EU regulation EC178/2002, which requires that all lots can be tracked throughout the process, from reception to inventory, production and shipping.

This project brings new levels of manufacturing collaboration and real-time visibility of costs and inventory across the enterprise, which are essential to Martens in their quest to be the lowest-cost producer in the private-label market. Armed with critical data throughout the value chain, the brewery is able to monitor and analyse the operation in such a way that important strategic decisions can be made to help stay ahead of the competition.