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Brewing, Drink and Dairy Processing News
News Release from: Harford Control | Subject: Drinks industry profits
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 08 September 2005
Profit opportunity breakthrough in
drinks industry
Harford Control have had considerable experience with reducing manufacturing costs in the juice/drinks industry, and have developed several profit improvement opportunity techniques
Harford Control have had considerable experience with reducing manufacturing costs in the juice/drinks industry The initial industry goal almost 10 years ago, was to improve packing yields and remove the mountain of quality control paper records filed away each week
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 11 Nov 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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Harford Control apply statistical process control techniques (SPC) transparently to any production filling line in the Food, Drink, Toiletry and Cosmetic industries, to improve operations
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A new, turnkey, production line, performance-measurement package is now available, requiring little factory resource, before generating major operational benefits
Data collected produced a production quality Audit Trail from which key-performance-indicators (KPIs) are produced.
Carton fillers have steadily increased in output, some with multiple heads each requiring individual adjustment, a far from simple task to maintain optimum control.
A combination of SPC techniques and training enables overfill to be reduced to an average of less than 0.1% whilst maintaining legal compliance.
These figures may appear relatively small, but an average yield improvement of 0.3% represents overfill levels of 3 tons of per week per million litre packs produced.
This represents an approximate saving of GBP800 per week.
However for factories producing 5 million litres per week, this equates to GBP4,000 in savings each week.
In 2005 new areas of improvement have now been investigated and these now include improved measurement and control of Brix via Harford BrixLink software.
Working with a process-refractometer-manufacturer, Harford can now read Brix measurements in realtime, which in turn automatically adjusts target weights in the weight control system to further trim wastage.
Users preferring off-line Brix checks can also trim this wastage using new technology refractometers with much improved accuracy and reliability.
Practical improvements of up to 0.2 Brix can often be made which, in turn increases yields still further.
Brix gains of 0.2 work through into 0.1% yield improvements which in turn saves a further GBP267 per week, per million litres packed.
Therefore, in a 5 million litre factory BrixLink can save another GBP1,335 per week.
Meeting the demands of supermarkets means profitability is directly related to efficiency.
With typically accepted overfills of 0.4% and Brix inaccuracies introducing another 0.1%, reducing such unnecessary waste, by 0.3% saves GBP5,335 per week in a 5 million litres/week factory.
This will contribute GBP275,000 per annum to factory profits every year.
Harford offer a free, site process-capability-study service to accurately assess each factory on its merits to highlight the achievable level of yield improvement.
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