Canpac Case Study
Recipe Management, Last Time Buy and
Non-Conformance Reporting
This case study describes how collaborative workflows were introduced to provide visibility and management of recipe changes across the departments responsible for marketing, planning, costing, production, procurement, and quality assurance, and how a rigorous ‘Non-Conformance Reporting’ process was implemented to manage and report quality issues.
The Customer
CANPAC International is Fonterra’s largest secondary packager of milk powders. The Hamilton-based site is a global supplier of branded nutritional powders, bulk blended nutritional milk powders and cans and can components. CANPAC’s product blending facilities, sophisticated can printing and assembling machines, component presses, can filling lines and sachet packing machines see Fonterra products branded and exported to Australia, the Middle-East, the Americas, and North and South-east Asia.
Business Challenges:
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- A) Recipe Management
Market requested product changes from a world-wide series of specialized products can result in as many as 40 product change requests per week, up to six months before production date.
In this high quality food, high specification industry, the cost penalties for an incorrect recipe entering manufacturing are huge. CANPAC wanted a Recipe Management process that would ensure that any recipe change would result in a review by all the manufacturing and quality assurance departments that should be concerned depending on the nature of the change. The workflow application would have to integrate with the existing ERP (enterprise resource planning).
- B) Last Time Buy
The ‘Last Time Buy’ process is required when it is necessary for specific materials, used in the manufacturing process, to be fully used up in order to allow a new product recipe to be created without undue cost to either the company or the customer.
The key business issues being addressed by the LTB system are:
- Replacement of a largely manual system
- Clear definition of the process and accountabilities to be followed
- The provision of wider visibility of LTB issues within the organisation
- Management and tracking of the process so as to minimise the write-off costs to either Canpac or the customer
- C) Non-Conformance Reporting
A process for Non-Conformance Reporting was required for the creation and management of Product Quality and Conformance issues within the Production and Warehousing functional areas at CANPAC International.
The key business issues being addressed by the NCR system are:
- Replacement of a largely manual system based around an Access database and paper documents
- The provision of wider visibility and more extensive reporting of NCR issues within the organisation
- Management and tracking of the issues through assessment, action and review through to closure
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Crest's Solutions:
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- Crest and CANPAC staff undertook a series of conference room pilots with keys users to define business processes and business rules.
- Crest implemented the resulting processes and rules into Procoll Workflow Applications.
- The Technical Services department responsible for the entry of recipe specifications into the Manufacturing system would raise a Recipe Management workflow for each new or changed recipe. Similarly, marketing staff would raise Last Time Buy workflows for product components to be managed to run out.
- Departmental reviewers are then engaged with automatically created workflow tasks based on process rules matching people against the recipe data changes.
- Workflow collates all review feedback for a final review by Technical Services and activation of the recipe for use.
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ROI / Benefits:
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- Automation of task allocation decisions based on product characteristics and user expertise.
- Provide visibility and management of tasks and responsibilities across multiple departments.
- Automate the transfer of information from one system to another
- Provide simple access to all workflow documentation within the workflow application context.
- A platform that supports growth and change through power and flexibility of the Procoll Workflow applications.
- The ‘quality gate’ opportunity for these workflows is now well recognized within CANPAC and acceptance of Procoll as a facilitator and enabler of a key business process has been achieved. There is a clear understanding across all the departments involved of the business value of reviewing technical set-up data early in the product change process.
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