Data Foundation for Industry 4.0 and the Smart Factory – MES CAT for Greiner Packaging

Sustainability and digitalization are key issues for modern packaging production. A key element of Greiner Packaging’s sustainability strategy is efficient production: the goal is to avoid rework as much as possible and keep unnecessary material or energy consumption to a minimum. The company can only achieve this with plant-independent, seamless, round-the-clock monitoring and control of shop floor processes.

Plattling, December 15, 2020

MES CAT for Greiner Packaging

MES: networking and digitalizing production

Greiner Packaging uses MES CAT SUITE, T.CON’s SAP-based manufacturing execution system, to digitalize its production and collate information. The machine times – downtime, idle time, productive time – are also transmitted in parallel to SAP ERP, where they are linked to the production order.

Furthermore, since MES CAT has bidirectional communication, approved production orders in the SAP system are immediately available in production. There is no longer any need for laborious, error-prone manual data transmission, or printing out production orders.

For additional added value, the link from production to ERP data makes it possible to analyze all levels of production on an economic as well as technical basis. Now that Greiner has successfully rolled out the suite, the company is benefiting from a superb data basis for analyses.

Data as the foundation for informative analyses

“With a standardized, high-quality data basis, we can carry out informative analyses, for example, to assess plant efficiency”, says Roland Schulz, Technology & Process Excellence Director at Greiner Packaging. “We can use the OEE analyses to compare machine and plant performance. This gives us an important infrastructure for identifying and exploiting optimization potential, and thus more sustainable and economic production. That’s real added value.”

T.CON’s suite was chosen for its seamless integration in SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) and its ability to adapt flexibly to discrete production systems with high quantities and high performance.

From injection molding to the Kavoblow machine

The new MES is now connected to over 500 systems in 15 plants worldwide – injection molding and extrusion machines; deep-drawing machines and the innovative “Kavoblow” for injection stretch blow molding.

MES CAT is now being optimized to individual plant requirements. In parallel with this, the suite is being gradually rolled out through all the remaining plants. Eventually, everyone will be using the system.

Medium-term plans also involve leveraging the suite’s predictive quality tools for early identification of production and material defects, thus reducing such defects to a minimum and marking another milestone on Greiner Packaging’s journey to becoming an Industry 4.0 Smart Factory. 

Read our project report to find out more about the KPIs the specialist packaging company uses to evaluate production in MES CAT. This includes the cockpits used by their production managers and the new tools employees are benefitting from.

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Ernesto Flores, Headquarters Plattling

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