When Del Monte’s consumer products operations were sold to Del Monte Pacific Ltd. and Del Monte’s former pet products division emerged as Big Heart Pet Brands, Randy Cotton found himself in a whole new set of circumstances.
“Overnight,” recalls Cotton, now the Senior Project Engineer of San Francisco-based Big Heart Pet Brands, “I became the sole corporate engineer as opposed to being a member of a corporate engineering group serving a very large pet food and consumer products company.”
It’s not that he’s flying solo when it comes to things like specifying packaging equipment. Pitching in are colleagues like Paul Baker, Senior Manager of Packaging R&D, who played a key role in getting OEMs to build precisely the kind of equipment that was needed to bring Milk-Bone Brushing Chews to store shelves. The line on which the chews are packaged was named 2014 PMMI Packaging Line of the Year. video: pp-oem.com/006
But even with Baker’s able assistance, it’s safe to say that where the acquisition of packaging machinery is concerned, Big Heart Pet Brands does not have an enormous internal team available to do the research and vetting. So it’s little wonder that the firm seeks to establish strategic partnerships with packaging machinery OEMs wherever possible. That means in most machinery-buying scenarios, they’re sitting down with people they know, people who, because they’ve brought good solutions in the past, are likely to do the same in the future.
“We’re always looking for that next thing that will make us more competitive,” says Cotton. “For the most part we’ve zeroed in on a core set of equipment makers who provide equipment and services that set them apart. As we establish this strategic relationship, one goal is to standardize across our plants, both in processing and packaging. This also lets us leverage additional benefits, whether it’s extra value-added services or pricing advantages or enhanced service levels. It’s important to point out that we aren’t looking at price alone. Best value for the dollars spent is a better way.”
Cotton is the first to acknowledge that ‘best value” can be a difficult thing to define. He reiterates that one thing it doesn’t involve is “looking for the lowest bidder.” It might be finding a provider with the best track record when it comes to after-sales support, or one that has the most robust infrastructure in terms of design and build. But given his company’s background, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is often found near the top of the list.
“One thing we wrestle with is that the numerous plants we operate were all originally established and equipped by separate entities that became parts of a whole through acquisition,” says Cotton. “Each facility still has its own culture to one extent or another. But we’re moving more and more in the direction of company standardization. That means that when we look at buying equipment, we’re trying to look at a bigger picture. What suits the whole company becomes the question. That’s why we’re looking so much more closely at things like TCO, reliability, uptime, and OEE. These are things that can be leveraged across multiple facilities if some kind of coordinated, integrated approach is in place.”
What about controls?
Because the firm is defining and implementing standards more than ever before, there’s a predictable preference to want to have pretty tight rein over the controls components and controls architecture governing the machines they buy.
“Legacy systems have to be taken into account,” says Cotton. “In our case, Rockwell is the predominant controls supplier. But others are in the mix, and these things need to be balanced out. Regardless of who the vendor is, factory network security is becoming increasingly important, and standards are central to that. So how does that play with the OEMs and the way they design their controls systems? That’s why we find ourselves beginning to dictate what components we want them to use a little more than in the past.”
Asked about notable advances in controls technologies, Cotton says add-on instructions (AOI) show much promise, using the creation of a conveyor as an example.
“Within the programming, you can actually create a virtual conveyor and define what it would look like—its motor, the motor’s starter, its limit switches,” he explains. “Within this program you define what a conveyor can possibly look like on that object. But after that, every time you have a conveyor you need to write code for, you just pull this defined object and enable or disable those aspects that are relevant to that specific conveyor. So if it’s a non-reversing conveyor you’re building, you disable that reversing portion. It saves us time on programming development.”
Cotton goes on to say that what really allows his company to do as well is standardized programming across plants. “Then, when we link that with some of our larger supervisory software like Wonderware or others, they have a similar graphical object that links directly to that,” he says. “So now you have a virtual programming object and then a graphical one. Development time is very quick, functionality is preserved, and security is assured. We’ve started pushing a lot of that programming down to some of the OEMs who are strategic partners with us, especially if we see that it would help them improve their equipment in terms of what they can offer us.”
Baker adds that flexibility and versatility are terribly important in the packaging machinery the firm seeks, as is quick changeover. But it’s far more important that a machine be flexible enough to do multiple sizes—even if it takes half a shift to make the change—than a machine be able go from one size to another in record time.
“The last thing we want is different lines or different pieces of equipment just to do three different package sizes,” says Baker.
Factoring the FATs
Cotton says that in general, Factory Acceptance Tests can vary considerably depending on the vendor, and how well the CPG’s project manager defined the FAT ahead of time.
“We’ve been standardizing the FAT where we can lately, and we see ourselves doing more of that in the future, partnering with OEMs where we can,” Cotton says. “We’ve seen real value in a well-designed and clearly defined FAT. You wind up catching a lot of problems while the machine is still at the OEM’s facility and correcting them before the machine even reaches our facility. It makes startup of that equipment go so much better. It comes up to speed the way it should.”
Can more of the FAT process be managed remotely or virtually? Cotton says they’re about to find out.
“We think we can because of some of the things we’ve implemented on this particular project,” he says. “A huge one is standardization. This piece of equipment is similar to others that we’ve developed before, so we feel we have a very good handle on the base functionality. We’ve also been very stringent in locking down the code on this machine. We hope this will lead to a situation where, as earlier models of the same machine exhibit problems, they can be quickly communicated to the OEM and then the solutions can be implemented across both the existing machines and the new ones coming out of the
OEM’s plant.
“We also try to measure the cost of conducting an FAT relative to the value it provides. If we’re pretty confident that there won’t be a lot of issues, and if we are confident about the operating system, then we have to ask ourselves if paying for an FAT is adding any value. In these cases, some version of a remote FAT, where we have a well defined FAT checklist that can be gone through in addition to relying on videos or online viewing, may provide the same level of value as sending people to do a live FAT.”
Speaking of video, Cotton is also a big believer in remote diagnostics for existing machines already in the firm’s plants.
“For some of the newer, more sophisticated pieces of equipment, we provide secure VPN access to help the OEM support us,” he says. “It depends to some extent on the technical skills of the people in a given plant.”
Cotton sees a lot of value in the guidance documents that PMMI’s Alliance for Innovation and Operational Excellence (AIOE) has been issuing. He points to One Voice for Hygienic Equipment Design for Low-Moisture Foods as a good example.
“In many ways it’s a direct response to the Food Safety Modernization Act,” says Cotton. “The approach was to create a channel or vehicle that would get the OEM and the CPG talking together. Now, where we have strategic machinery vendors, I’m sharing with them what I learned from the One Voice work.”
Cotton’s final observation is a reminder that the CPG companies and the OEMs are, at the end of the day, in it together.
“Remember, CPGs can add value to how an OEM builds equipment,” he says. “After all, it’s the CPG that runs that equipment day in and day out.”
