Summer Garden Food Manufacturing

Business Challenges

1. Lacked data visibility for equipment performance.

2. Difficulty identifying micro downtime impact.

3. Inability to easily extract data reports.

With an operation that runs two 12-hour shifts a day, 5 days a week and produces up to 100,000 cases of sauces weekly, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a priority. But until Summer Garden Foods installed the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform™ in late 2022, they lacked the data visibility needed to ensure equipment was performing as efficiently as possible.

“We were missing downtime. We knew we had it, but we couldn’t find it. Our kettle yields weren’t equaling our run times. We wanted to start tracking downtime at a more detailed level than the piece of paper the operator writes,” Jason Morrow, Controls Technician with Summer Garden Food Manufacturing, explains. “Plex is easily scalable. We could start with one machine and then build off that once we knew what we’re doing. The scalability was one of the biggest reasons we went with Plex.”

Downtime Minutes Add Up

The first task for Summer Garden Food Manufacturing was tracking downtime on a key piece of equipment: the filler machine. The machine’s processes are controlled by Rockwell Automation 5300 series ControlLogix programmable controllers, which meant they were already collecting a lot of data. Using Plex Production Monitoring, the food manufacturer was able to easily program and extract data reports that pulled data from the Rockwell Automation controllers and several other sources.

“We found we had four hours of downtime per shift. Operators were repeatedly opening the door which stops the machine, making adjustments, and then closing the door. A minute here, two minutes there, five minutes here add up substantially throughout a shift,” Jason says. “But the operators weren’t writing it down. They didn’t think it was anything big. Yet, three to four hours of downtime a shift is a ton of downtime.”

With that valuable insight, the company is now focused on improving operator training and control to help improve machine performance. One tactic Summer Garden Food Manufacturing is undertaking is development of a visualization screen that provides operators insight into their personal daily OEE to facilitate individual awareness and growth.