Blog : How Line MES can help you decarbonise your packaging operation

Line Control for Sustainability

It took us a decade to design, develop and refine our award-winning Line MES, the solution to waste reduction throughout the entire packaging line.

It’s the industry’s most sophisticated (yet intuitive) line control suite.

If every large manufacturer in the world used Line MES, endless amounts of product, packaging and energy waste could be reduced at every step of the FMCG and industrial packaging process.

The financial savings alone are huge.

But Line MES also offers significant environmental and factory digitalisation benefits.

“We can now make batches in 1/50th of the size, in 1/8th of the time… [Line MES has] pretty much eliminated all manual intervention. We’re seeing 25% energy efficiency over what we designed for.”

Kevin Worrell, Merrifield Project Manager, Dulux (Greenfield Factory)

Features

Line MES is completely customisable to your specific needs.

Here are just some of the features that make it an essential tool for sustainable manufacturing:

Automatic changeovers: The whole line can be reset at a single command—including recipes, conveyor speeds and machine settings—for multiple product changeovers in a single shift.
Rapid, recipe-driven changeovers, with automatic sourcing of materials as an option.
Flying changeovers, where a new product enters the line before the previous product run has finished.
Advanced control of every machine on the line in unison or individually.
Consistent data from all the machines on the line, consistent user experience across all the machines and seamless interfacing between them.
Automated line optimisation, where machine learning algorithms use standardised data in real-time to automatically make adjustments for Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
End-to-end integrated quality control monitoring.
Customisable integration with any ERP system.
Fully digitised (paperless) manufacturing.
Authentic OEE, eliminating opportunities for operators to influence delay accounting.

Benefits

This phenomenal packaging line management system can give you the power to control your entire operation from one dashboard.

It’s the ultimate tool for line efficiency and waste reduction.

Reduce Material Waste

Right product, right package, right labelling.

Line MES ensures that the correct materials and packaging are used for every SKU and that they’re made available at the exact moment they're needed. Then it double-checks they're all correct.

It takes all the human error out of the equation.

Line MES can be further integrated with warehouse automation, ensuring that the correct type and quantity of packaging medium are brought to the factory floor.

As well, having everything digitised makes for accurate forecasting, preventing over- or under-ordering of materials.

Reduce Energy Waste

Line MES reduces consumption of energy and air.

While automatically making adjustments for Overall Equipment Effectiveness, air and energy use are optimised. It progressively slows or shuts down conveyors when there are gaps in production, much like escalators running in limp mode until you step onto them.

Line MES combines all the operational data from the sensors and controls of your machines in a single interface. Instead of having to walk along the line and configure each machine individually, you can do it all from just one window on a stationary or mobile device.

Production managers can change the product on a line at the push of a button, which automatically adjusts the control settings and production data on everything from depalletising, conveying, filling, inspection, coding, labelling, case packing, traceability and palletising to stretch wrapping, robotics and AGVs.

The use of recipes enables hundreds of different products to be set up and run with ease.

Time savings on some changeovers can amount to hours per shift, which consequently provides energy savings across the entire operation.

There’s also the commissioning. We have advanced conveyor controls for a variety of situations, such as mass flow, accumulation and pressure-less conveying that allows advanced control of a production line.

Commissioning and control of these conveying systems can be completely done via the HMI with no programming necessary.

Line MES itself is pre-commissioned, so it’s quickly implemented onsite.

True OEE

While original equipment manufacturers build control into their machines with remote monitoring and evaluation for faults, and there are software products around that offer overall line control or measure simplified OEE, they have limitations.

As line integrators, we work with most brands of equipment and software, so we see what’s missing.

Foodmach’s Line MES provides 100% accurate OEE data and makes the invisible visible.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness is dependent on the synchronisation between different parts of the line. For example, the bottle sorter, filler, capper, labeller and case packer all need to do their job at the right speed and efficiency.

Even the smallest mismatch can slow the whole operation down.

Some control systems will tell you how many bottles were filled, but won’t tell you why, ie. that the case packer was waiting for blanks. You might be relying on a scribble on a piece of paper from a line operator to tell you that.

Most lines are measured at the filler, and won’t tell you that the labeller ran out of labels. Operators will tend to blame the machine, not their management.

But there’s no hiding from the Foodmach Line MES.

All is revealed on a dashboard that can be live-viewed from anywhere.

Line MES gives you complete visibility across your entire packaging operation.

Designed for Bespoke Lines

LMES has been developed for Australian market conditions, with many line changeovers and partial line upgrades using a mix of old and new equipment.

A key differentiator is its ability to work with different control platforms on the same line, enabling integration of many different brands of PLCs, yet delivering a seamless operator experience.

Every machine vendor implements different signals for interfacing, which makes it difficult to connect them to higher-level control and OEE systems.

To solve this issue, the Machine Interface module takes in any signals available from 3rd party vendors and converts them to OMAC/PackML standardised packaging machinery language tags.

This allows the most basic machines to become fully compliant to our Line MES, providing advanced intelligent control and OEE data for each unit on a line.

It has taken our software and controls team, using its unmatched skill with packaging machinery language, over ten years to streamline Foodmach’s existing line control offer into our new Line MES.

We’ve poured our many decades of expertise in high-speed FMCG lines and low-speed complex lines into this suite of software.

There are various modules available, including:

Advanced Visualisation for motor control and machine interfacing
OEE Real-time with shift scheduling, event management
OEE Historical with machine dashboards
Advanced Recipe management for multiple SKUs.

Imagine having all the production run information sent from the ERP to your line control, without the need for any paper.

All the line manager needs to do is decide which order to run products, based on Line MES’ recommendations. With everything digital, you’ll have comprehensive, standardised, real-time data to guide performance.

It’s the ultimate line integration tool and line control experience and possibly the only way to capture all the benefits of Industry 4.0.

Line as a Machine

Line MES is the control centre of our newly-launched Line-as-a-Machine (LaaM) turnkey offer, which takes a holistic view of the packaging line and treats it as one complete system.

In much the same way as a car is a collection of OEM parts, Foodmach delivers the entire line as a single high-performance vehicle with guaranteed performance.