Industry: Meat
With its new meat processing plant, Granjas Carroll de México (GCM) wants to supply the metropolis of Mexico City with fresh meat. Their revolutionary project is also enabled by the digitization and automation of their processes.
The new factory of Mexico’s largest pork processing company is based in Oriental, in the federal state of Puebla. The company plans to slaughter, cut and process about 1.3 million pigs per year on a space of some 32,000 square meters. This corresponds to a performance of approx. 600 pigs slaughtered per hour or 5,000 cut animals per day.
“The key component for our success is smart technologies. We can only reach our ambitious performance goals by digitizing and automating our fresh meat production. We want to visually digitize the whole process chain,” says Tito Tablada, press officer
CSB FACTORY ERP plans and controls the complex processes
CSB FACTORY ERP was chosen as the business software, as it is able to communicate with the group’s ERP system as well as with the equipment and machines via standard interfaces.
As the central nervous system of the meat processing plant, CSB FACTORY ERP takes over the complete data management as well as planning and control functions. With all advantages linked to it: a uniform data basis, a smooth information flow between slaughtering, cutting, processing and logistics and an almost paperless control of the processes.
Thus, the simulations established with the system supply managers with real-time information on production demand, customer orders, stock on hand and capacities. The result is better production planning, fewer set-up times, a maximal rate of stock turnover and optimal use of resources.
In cutting, the software enables fully automatic entry and documentation of the weights of primal cutting and the cutting entries. What is more: In order to avoid unnecessary interruptions of the material flow, software supported information points at cutting exit ensure that the right meat parts are available in the right sequence at the right target lines. The system automatically assumes this distribution on the basis of production planning and under consideration of the capacities at the individual targets. In the end, yield control enables economic transparency by comparing the theoretical yield with the actual yield
Many tasks are completed with mobile devices
Mobile automated data capture is part of the technology concept of the meat processing plant. Scanners capture the labeled items at the production exit, MDC devices are used for picking, and hand-held terminals display stocktaking data: mobile data processing opens up new opportunities for more efficiency and better documentation of processes in areas, where routing slips were used in the past. Paperless processes make employees more productive, the error rate is lower and the data quality as well as the data availability are improved as there are no media disruptions.
Two seconds for traceability
As for all meat processors, traceability is extremely important for GCM. What was formerly simply sold as a product, must now be loaded with lots of additional information to facilitate immediate withdrawal from the market in case of recalls.
GCM only needs two seconds to get the relevant data out of the ERP system. This speed can only be achieved as the data of all raw and auxiliary materials are entered in the ERP system at receiving and passed on electronically to every single production step. The fact that the data are entered online in the production processes avoids unnecessary additional work and reduces the time for documentation and labeling.
