One Million Weights a Day - and Still Collecting

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The Challenge

A large food manufacturing facility runs multiple production lines, 7 days per week producing approximately one million bars of cheese every 24 hours. The weight for every bar needs to be collected and recorded to ensure that weighing guidelines and quality control standards are being met.

Collecting and recording that many weights, that quickly, requires a superior data collection application program that will not let them down. Labtronics Collect software has provided them with that solution.

The Solution

Collect is being used on 6 production lines to collect weights from the RS232 ports on the checkweighers that are weighing the cheese bars.

Depending on the speed of the line, Collect is capturing the data at rates ranging from 40 – 160 weights per min. As each bar passes over the checkweigher, the weight is displayed on a large screen for line workers and managers to view. At the same time, Collect transfers the weight directly to an Excel spreadsheet where it is stored and graphed, in real-time.

The Excel spreadsheet is setup to calculate the standard deviation, the weight average, the number of samples, and automatically graphs data points after a pre-specified number of weights have been taken. The first 65,000 rows of data are saved within the main worksheet - additional data is saved to a secondary spreadsheet within the same workbook.

Each day, the spreadsheets and graphs are saved from each line.

Result

Every morning management uses the spreadsheets created by Collect, to review the data from the previous day’s production and quickly identify any production issues or trends. In addition, the Excel spreadsheets are archived so that they can be referenced and used for historical trending and to support regulatory compliance requirements.

Collect has given this food manufacturing facility a reliable solution for capturing large volumes of production data in real time. Collect’s close integration with Excel makes data readily accessible and valuable for maintaining product quality and production standards.


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