Waste Management

Operations management at a chocolate products factory realized that the amount of generated waste became a serious issue. The process was organized into multiple work centers connected by different transport systems, a mixture of conveyors and carts. Waste was generated in multiple places, and to prevent production stops, it was handled quickly, removed from the production area, and piled aside. Eventually, shift reports contained the correct weight of the waste, but information where it was generated was lost.

Operations management invested in optical counter systems for conveyors and applied label tracking on cart transports. Newly generated information was fed into the existing MES system, which could easily relate it to actual production and, based on precise material throughputs, generate exact waste reports pinpointing critical places.

This information was further related to the BoM and recorded process parameters (humidity, temperatures, and processing speeds) to find the root cause of material loss.