Campina Meets EU Food Law Traceability

A thoughtful approach to integrated coding has resulted in fewer coding errors, increased production efficiency and cost-savings across multiple sites.

Campina was created in 1989 as a result of the merger between DMV Campina and Melkunie. Campina has thirty food processing facilities located in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and Poland. Their products include liquid milk, milk drinks, yogurts, desserts, cheese, butter, milk powder, condensed milk, cream liqueurs, and ingredients for the international food and pharmaceutical industries. Their products are marketed and sold throughout the world with annual sales of over 3.6 billion Euros. The company is divided into five groups: Campina Netherlands, Campina Germany, Campina International, and Industrial Products and Cheese & Butter. Campina Cheese & Butter is divided into two divisions: Campina Holland Cheese and Campina Buttergold, which produce over 160,000 tons of cheese and 65,000 tons of butter annually.

Business Drivers:

Business and Regulatory Needs Require More Automated Product Identification and Data Management. After examining areas where improvements could be made, Campina concluded that they had inefficient logistics processes. The current processes had little uniformity from plant to plant, produced a variety of clerical mistakes and labeling errors, and would not be able to meet increasing regulatory and customer requirements. Campina decided that a new product and pallet labeling system would be required. The new system needed to be able to handle both fixed and variable weight cheese and butter products, ensure improvements in logistical operations, and improve product tracking and tracing. This would also require the system to provide automatic data exchange to and from the SAP system, as well as a straightforward way for future interface to the production system. After further investigation, Campina decided that all labels must be based upon international standards. They selected the EAN128 international standard, a very high-density linear symbology that can encode text, numbers, several functions and the entire 128 character ASCII character set.

Benefits:

Annual Savings Exceed 185,000 Euros per Year Campina is saving about 185,000 Euros per year across six production plants and 50,000 Euros per year in the four co-packing sites, says Huub Buckx, Head of Campina Data & Systems Management. We are also saving our third party logistics suppliers about 80,000 Euros per year because the automated labeling and tracking system information has helped them simplify their inbound and outbound operations. The system helped to improve on-time delivery, shorten delivery times, and improve customer satisfaction. There are fewer mistakes in palletizing, picking, and shipping. There are fewer customer returns due to incorrect product or expiration date. Line downtime has been reduced. The system also provided more reliable data to the SAP system, which allowed Campina to shorten planning cycles and provide more accurate and timely customer billing. ARC has observed that many companies are beginning to recognize that the benefits of a fully integrated and automated product-case-pallet identification and traceability management system go well beyond packaging operations and far exceed their expectations.

A Single-Source Purpose-Built:

Traceability Solution, Installed Over a Weekend After screening dozens of companies, six companies were invited to present their proposed solution. This was narrowed to three companies from which MARKEM was finally considered the best choice for Campina. One important reason for the selection of MARKEM ® was that it already had established a good relationship with Campina through another project. Huub Buckx of Campina said, We had a pleasant way of working and communicating with MARKEM. I call it the click,either you have it or you don't! Another key factor was that MARKEM could take responsibility for all the software and hardware devices, and software and hardware interfaces comprising a totally applied system from a single supplier as well as providing global support. This final supplier selection criterion comes as no surprise to ARC since we have been seeing more and more food companies like Campina, faced with rapid technology advances and limited availability of capital and technical resources, turning to suppliers with extensive domain expertise and the ability to provide a complete application solution with single source responsibility. The project began with pilot testing that included some minor software modifications and developing the communications interfaces in order to meet Campina's requirements. During this period MARKEM also provided one half day of training for the Campina staff. Upon completion of the pilot testing, the system was installed in production over a weekend and was up and running at limited production speeds on Monday. At first the operators thought it was an extra burden because they had to work in a different way,explains Huub Buckx, Head of Campina Data & Systems Management whose department headed this project. However after one week and more closely supervised training by MARKEM personnel, Campina was at maximum performance and the operators really liked the new system. The elimination of manual data entry, and even more significantly, manual data entry mistakes, made their job much easier.

Phase 1:

An Automated Labeling, Traceability, and Packaging Line Management System The new system has automated many traditionally manual tasks. The heart of the system is the MARKEM CoLOSTM software which provides all the integration, product traceability, and packaging line management functionality that has allowed Campina to meet or exceed all of their stated project requirements. Each day or as required, the SAP system transmits customer order information, such as lot number, product number, and proposed ingredients to use for each order, to the CoLOS software. In CoLOS Manager, the supervisor can determine the actual ingredients to be used for each order thereby matching ingredient lot numbers with product lot numbers. The supervisor can then plan and prioritize the orders for daily production and transmit this information to CoLOS Control for use by the shift operator. If necessary, the shift operator has the flexibility to further prioritize these orders to ensure maximum throughput. When the operator selects an order to run, the system prompts the operator to run a test label and confirm its accuracy and readability before allowing actual product labeling to commence. Based upon the order information from SAP and the in-line Mettler Toledo weigh scale, the correct labels for the product and/or box are automatically printed and applied by MARKEM Cimjet printer/applicators. The applied labels are then verified accurate and readable by in-line bar code scanners. If they are not readable the system automatically stops the packaging line so that the operator can take appropriate action. The boxes continue on to the automated palletizer, which receives pallet loading instructions (the stacking pattern) from the order information in CoLOS Manager, or it can be manually entered. MARKEM CoLOS Software automatically determines when the correct number of boxes of which product have been stacked. The system automatically generates, stores, and ­prints pallet labels with all the necessary product information and the pallet SSCC (Serial Shipping Container Code) number. After the pallet labels are applied, the operator uses a radio frequency wireless LXE handheld scanner to scan the pallet label and identify whether the pallet is going to shipping or to warehousing. Using wireless handheld scanners CoLOS Ship keeps track of the progress of each order and provides SAP with order completion confirmation and warehouse and shipping information. The MARKEM CoLOS software has many features that make it powerful, yet easy to use. It has role based security access. The production planning function includes order processing time information and calculations that determine how much production time it will take to complete the order. This simplifies priority scheduling. The system also handles per customer per product specification information including additional information such as packaging specifications. CoLOS Report provides product traceability functionality and a product traceability report that includes, among other things, the SSCC numbers, batch numbers, article numbers, production dates and times, pallet information, pallets for each order, and additional customer information.

Phase 2:

Future Plans for Automated Despatch (DESADV) The MARKEM traceability system is installed in six Campina manufacturing sites and four co-packer plants in Belgium and the Netherlands. It is interfaced to the SAP systems at eight of these locations. Campina and MARKEM are currently enhancing the system to transmit additional data that is stored in the CoLOS software to the SAP system so that the Despatch Advice Message (DESADV/ASN) can be fully automated. This will further improve customer service, reduce operating costs and simplify regulatory compliance, such as US import advanced notice requirements of the US Bioterrorism Act. It will also allow Campina to meet new customer requirements for automatically transmitting pallet information directly to their customers' business systems. ARC believes that future business and regulatory requirements cannot be met without a completely automated electronic records system that ensures a single version of the truth, such as Campina is in the process of implementing.

System Architecture

The system includes CoLOS Manager, CoLOS Sync, CoLOS Control, CoLOS Report, and CoLOS Ship software modules, operator workstations, data server, supervisor workstations, an Ethernet network, Mettler Toledo ID1 weigh scale, MARKEM Cimjet printer/labelers, laser barcode readers, and LXE wireless RF scanners and RF antennas. The CoLOS software interfaces with the SAP system and auto-identification devices.