Digital Technologies and the Future of Manufacturing
Case Study- Industrial Internet of Things
INTRODUCTION
Elliot was the plant manager of a medium-sized beef and lamb product manufacturer called XYZ Food.
His plant was 40 miles outside of a major US West Coast city. He had been there for 15 years, but the
company was much older than that. It was started in the 1950s by a local entrepreneur and had been
family-owned ever since. Each week, the plant produced roughly 1 million pounds of product which
varied based on the product mix. Their most popular products were ground beef patties and ground
sausage breakfast patties. In order to produce their product mix, the plant ran some combination of 7
different manufacturing lines with a staff of roughly 400 employees. They really only had enough staff to
operate 3 or 4 lines at a time but had the additional lines for custom-order products. The staffing
shortage was primarily due to the job opportunities in the area. It was a very competitive environment.
Over the past year, Elliot had noticed attainment slipping. For the plant, attainment was measured as
the percentage of pounds produced against their expected pounds produced for the day. Frequently,
their weekly goals of pounds produced and cost per pound produced were missed. Even more alarming,
many of his management team pointed to a variety of root causes. It seemed that no one really knew
what was the cause for dropping attainment. Ultimately, the 9 AM manager’s stand-up frequently
devolved into an argument between Luiz, the production manager, and Stacy, the quality manager. Elliot
liked both Luiz and Stacy. He felt that if given the correct information and data, they were both capable
of making smart business decisions. Putting the correct information in front of them was the hard part.
PRODUCTION
Production was split into two processes: batching and forming. Thus, there were two teams: the
batching team and the forming team. The batching team took raw material from suppliers and mixed it
in large blenders. In the process, they added important preservatives and the company’s secret
seasoning mix. Following batching, forming took the batch and fed it through one of the 7 lines. Within
the line, a forming machine shaped the batch into individual patties. A conveyor led to a spiral freezer
that used liquid nitrogen to freeze the patties. Finally, following the freezer, two cartooning machines
created boxes, filled the boxes with patties, and glued the boxes shut to complete the process. Boxes
were stacked on pallets and then stored in the warehouse until shipped to customers (specifically
grocery stores and foodservice restaurants). For additional detail, see Figure 1 which shows a map of the
facility. To accomplish this process, production had two shifts each day. The first shift ran from 6 AM to
4:30 PM and the second shift from 4:30 PM to 2 AM. From 2 AM to 6:30 AM each morning a sanitation
crew cleaned the plant from head to toe. The sanitation crew was managed by the Quality Manager,
Stacy. Each production operator worked four 10 hour shifts a week. With this setup, production was
able to run 3 or 4 of the 7 lines each day. Because beef patties and sausage patties were most popular,
they were most frequently running Lines 4 and 5. Luiz trusted his production supervisors and staff. They
worked hard to make sure lines were staffed and running. Unfortunately, he felt that his team struggled
to understand and prioritize their biggest production problems. Some days, it was the hand-off between
the batching team and the forming team. If the batch was not prepared in time, the forming team would
stand and wait without the line running. If the batching team got too far ahead and the line was down
unexpectedly, the batch might sit out too long and expire. Other days, the cartooning machine was
constantly jamming causing small 3 and 4 minute jams. Luiz suspected that on a bad day, these might
add up to 2 or 3 hours of wasted production time. Finally, the line start-up process could be tedious. The
freezer was finicky. It might need 30 minutes to lower down to the correct temperature. Sometimes the
timing on the machine that lasered the expiration date on the box was off. To make matters worse,
Luiz’s assistant production supervisor had just put in his two weeks. Luiz also had problems external to
his own team. He and the quality team did not always see eye to eye on whether to throw out bad
products. At least twice last week, he and Stacy got in an argument about a batch on the plant floor that
needed to be thrown out. The food safety standard was that any batch sitting on the plant floor for
greater than 6 hours was contaminated and unusable. Luiz was confident that it hadn’t hit that 6-hour
time limit. But, the label on the batch was likely incorrect and was missing a batched timestamp.
Because he couldn’t prove how long it had been sitting there, Stacy demanded that the batch be thrown
out. A batch was anywhere from 4,000 - 5,000 lbs which was no small loss.
QUALITY
The quality team was structured much like production as far as shifts and scheduling. Their goal was to
ensure that the plant was creating not only a quality product that people would enjoy eating but also a
safe product. The top of their concerns was bacterial growth, foreign material in the product, and that
their products had the proper weight. For bacterial growth, the longer that product sat out in the open
air, the more likely that it could have significant bacterial growth. Proper sanitation practices within the
facility and operators wearing correct Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) also helped deter bacteria
from growing in the product. Foreign material could be a variety of items. In some instances, the
customer complaint could be about hair (employees on the line were required to wear hair nets at all
times) while other complaints could be about inedible debris from machines or the facility itself in the
product. Finally, some customer complaints had to do with purchasing a 6 patty box of hamburgers and
only getting 5. This was a “lightweight” issue. To check for all of these issues, Quality Analysts spent their
day observing production and manually sampling. Every 15 minutes, samples were taken from each step
in the batching and forming line. They were tested for temperature, run through a metal detector to
check for foreign material, weighed, and finally, a portion was sent to an offsite lab for bacterial growth
observation. Stacy frequently worried that her team was unable to sample enough of the product. In the
past six months, she saw an increase in customer complaints about product being lightweight. Even
more frightening was a customer complaint about a nail in a patty. And finally, the plant had two hits for
listeria mono. This meant that any product created surrounding a positive test-- in between the two
surrounding negative tests-- had to be thrown out.
FUTURE INVESTMENTS
Elliot had heard all these hurdles from his management team. In his mind, no one knew what to tackle
first and what was the biggest concern. Recently, he had toured a facility of a new plant-based meat
company that utilized state-of-the-art technology. Inspired, he decided he needed to invest in new
technology. At the moment, both production and quality tracked all their data the old fashion way – pen
and paper. Elliot knew there was a better way, but he could hardly work the Smart TV in his living room.
How was he supposed to identify where to invest technology in his plant?