Intelligent production planning at Burkhardt Feinkostwerke

Burkhardt Feinkostwerke GmbH, a company making ketchup- and mustard-based products, has implemented paperless production and a consistently harmonised information flow – from raw-materials receipt all the way through to transport planning for the finished goods, based on Krones’ IPP production planning system, in its newly built plant at Schmölln in Thuringia.
After transfer of the orders from the ERP system, the defined maximum stock of finished goods and the inventories of raw materials are incorporated in the production planning computation. Further stipulations are cutting change-over and cleaning times, and the optimum top-up levels for the stocks while simultaneously meeting all the customers’ orders on hand.
The occupancy plan allocates the produced quantities to the individual production, filling and packaging areas concerned. When it comes to ketchup production, the preparation lines are given a production specification for each of the products to be made. The quantities required as laid down in the production plan are withdrawn from stock and booked into the individual order in question via barcode ID, using the hand-held terminal.  This allows for tracking the flow of raw and packaging materials at any time.
All the requisite data, plus information on the “degree of completion” for the ongoing order, can be accessed on terminals throughout the factory. All the details involved can be retrieved in the shape of a parts list: bottle type, product sort, customer, BB date of the product concerned, number of sales units, label type, closure type and colour, etc.  Information on line efficiency is provided by Krones’ LDS production data acquisition system. The operating states of the lines are stored in memory at all data points and used as the basis for statistical analyses.
When the merchandise is booked into the finished-goods store, the warehouse management system (WMS) takes over inventory control, plus dispatch and order-picking plans for the loading ramps.