Intelligent Manufacturing € June € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 6

Nabisco Adopts Expert POG System

Nabisco Biscuit Co. (East Hanover, N.J.), a manufacturer of cookies and crackers, is in the midst of a major transformation of its organization as it drives forward to meet the challenges of today's food processing marketplace. Nabisco began the change process with its Process Operating Guidelines (POG) program, where it identified a set of statistical process control (SPC) tools and metrics to optimize the quality and cost-efficiency of its operations. Next, Nabisco used expert systems technology to develop a process control system that provides it with real-time operating information at its bakeries, as well as a flexible development environment for customizing process control strategies to support new product lines.

The first installation of the expert technology is at Nabisco's Atlanta facility. Nabisco has implemented G2, a real-time intelligent system from Gensym Corp. (Cambridge, Mass.), as a comprehensive quality management system, collecting data and analyzing it to keep the process under control and provide real-time, on-line operator advice. The POG information is also being fed to a relational database that supports a new production management system that Nabisco has instituted at the plant.

In Atlanta, managers and line workers now meet four times daily to review data and map it against process guidelines and financial targets to keep track of operations and drive continuous improvement. "This process control solution, along with our Daily Management System, has given us the ability to collect and analyze information quickly, and has made us a better business," said Gary Trider, plant manager at Nabisco's Atlanta facility. "We finally have the data and on-line advice we need to empower our employees to make good decisions. That's allowed us to decentralize management control down to the shop floor and reorganize into Business Unit Teams, where operators, line managers, maintenance people, quality engineers, and financial personnel work together to take responsibility for individual lines.

"POG is a tool that allows people to make the right decisions at the right time," Trider continued. "There's all this stuff going around about how you should empower employees, but if you empower employees and don't give them good tools, they're not really empowered."

Nabisco's Atlanta bakery is a 450,000 sq. ft. facility employing 600 workers. The plant produces 40 different products for the Southeast region as well as national distribution. The plant is a complete production operation -- raw material comes in the front door and gets mixed, baked, packaged, and shipped. The process is highly automated, with a number of critical parameters that have to be carefully tracked to ensure consistent quality, yield and asset utilization.

"We need to monitor things like moisture, temperature, color, pH, and so forth," Trider said. "There was a lot of 'art' in the process; we wanted to put in more science." That led to the POG program.

The G2-based system continually tracks data coming off the automated production lines. "For example, we monitor the delivery of flour, sugar and liquid to the baking line," Trider explained. "Sensors are attached to scales to check the weight of ingredients, since any variation could significantly affect the quality of the batch."

Nabisco Engineering worked with Simons Engineering Co. (Greenville, S.C.) to develop the system, which is configured so that the operating data is transferred from PLCs over Ethernet to Digital's Alpha AXP servers running G2. "The user interface is set up like a control chart, with green, yellow, and red used to indicate running to target, drifting away from specification, and out of control," Trider said. Operators are presented with a pick list of alternatives whenever an action must be taken. The list includes the solution that G2 has determined was most successful in the past when a similar situation occurred.

"Our operators now have real-time information, so they can drive the process," said Ronnie Cone, POG coordinator. "That has dramatically reduced the time between when an event happens and when we take action; we're jumping on problems so much faster." Operators can put the line on hold or scrap product whenever a product exceeds process boundaries.

According to Don Boyle, senior director for process control systems for Nabisco, line operators have really responded to their new levels of responsibility. "They're very enthusiastic," he said. "On a personal level, they're proud to be working on such a modern system. And what we hear is that they like their jobs better, because they have more information."

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