At Niagara Bottling of Ontario, CA, analyzing line performance is done with the aid of a data acquisition tool called EIT (Efficiency Improvement Tool) from Sidel.
"Part of our competitive strength is built on vertical integration," says Rali Sanderson, director of engineering at Niagara, which has seven plants nationwide. "Preforms, bottles, closures—we make them all. We also have 16 lines that run at speeds higher than 1,000 bottles/min. In that kind of manufacturing environment, the more you know about a line, the better equipped you are to attack problems where they really exist. It makes line analysis less opinion-based and more scientific."
As Niagara has grown in recent years to the point where annual sales are now in the range of $500 million, reliable data acquisition has become more useful all the time. "Our director of manufacturing can use it as a tool to manage lines across the country without ever leaving his office," says Sanderson. "Take labeling, for example. He can quickly and conveniently compare the performance of every labeler we run. If one lags behind the others, we know precisely where to take corrective action."
When asked if the EIT system is integrated with upper level business systems such as MES or ERP, Sanderson said not yet. But it's soon to be explored.
"We rolled out an Oracle ERP system company-wide a little over a year ago," says Sanderson. "We're now looking at better, more automated ways of feeding EIT data into the ERP software."
At the March 31 Packaging Automation Forum in Chicago, Sanderson and Bill
Hall, director of manufacturing at Niagara, will talk about how EIT has
simplified new line installations and made it easier to keep them running at
peak efficiency. For more information on the Packaging Automation Forum,
sponsored by Packaging World and Automation World magazines, visit www.packworld.com/paf
