Veron Case Study

Business Challenges:

• Create an Inventory Management System that would integrate with any host ERP or MRP source of Product and Order information
• Create a Sorting Engine that would dynamically create a product sort plan from the random output received from manufacturing and sort product to customer Orders, or to inventory management needs, while the product was being frozen or chilled to industry specific food regulations 
• Allow the Sort Engine to apply different strategies to sorting and discharging to solve the scheduling needs of the plant as the needs varied with seasons, Orders, and product mixes
• Provide an equipment-simulator plug-in to the application to model the business processes to test abilities and theories such as capacity, sort logic, efficiency, time and speed in virtual scenarios

Crest's Solutions:

• Design and development of the application, PLC Interfaces, flexible sort strategies
• Construction of a PLC Simulator to allow development and testing of the IMS application without the necessity of having a PLC and expensive related freezer equipment present
• Provision of a rich Windows based User Interface for the factory Operator’s & Planner’s use
• 24x7 support for IMS customers
• Implementation choices to allow site specific configurations to customize behavior and strategies

ROI / Benefits:

• An integrated Inventory Management Solution and freezer/chiller equipment under PLC control that sorts frozen product to a palletisable state ready for warehousing or transportation
• Reduction in staff needs in the post-production handling of product before dispatch
• Visibility of inventory promised against Orders while product is still within the freezing / sorting stages of production
• Tracking by barcode of all product units through the sorting & dispatching lifecycle