Amcor improves bottom line with Citect

Amcor, one of the world’s leading packaging companies, offers a broad range of plastic, fibre, metal and glass packaging products, along with packaging-related services. The company has annual sales of AU$10.9 billion and employs 22,000 people worldwide. In Australia, Amcor has four beverage can manufacturing plants — Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth — and an end-making facility in Ballarat, Victoria, as well as a can and end manufacturing plant in Auckland, New Zealand.

Faced with ever-increasing economic pressures, Amcor is continually looking to optimise plant performance, and is now further improving its production levels and reducing wastage following the completion of its rollout of CitectSCADA and Ampla industrial and business software across its Australian and New Zealand beverage can manufacturing sites.

“We originally launched a pilot at our Revesby plant in Sydney in 2004 and, based on the success of that project, rolled out the software across all our other beverage can plants, with the exception of Rocklea in Brisbane, by early 2007,” said Revesby operations manager Drew Winning.

Rocklea is Amcor’s largest plant in Australia and produces the most diverse range of can sizes. The plant employs about 90 people. The plant expansion and the implementation of the Citect software will push production levels at the site up from 850 million cans per annum to over 1.2 billion.

Overall, the company has seen a lift in productivity in its can-making plants of up to 7% and a reduction in wastage of nearly 20% since the initial implementation of the Citect systems. These improvements are largely due to the ability of the integrated software packages to easily identify true causes of plant downtime and spoilage over more significant time periods than just one or two shifts.

CitectSCADA is an integrated HMI/SCADA that delivers a scalable and reliable control and monitoring system, while Ampla, a manufacturing execution system, delivers real-time access to plant and business information allowing key personnel to identify and act on opportunities to refine the workflow, maximise overall equipment effectiveness, and correct problems before they impact on supply chain, regulatory compliance and production.

“The main driver behind implementing the integrated SCADA/Ampla solution from Citect was our need to get a better understanding of downtime and spoilage by machine,” said Winning. “We needed to look not only at the last shift but at the performance of the production line over a longer period, such as a week or month, in order to develop appropriate response plans.”

Winning says the Citect systems allow the operations team to review extensive data on the performance of a piece of equipment over a year or more. The data can be broken down into categories including product, size and team.

“The Citect systems are an important component in our continuous improvement strategy. They not only help us to identify a problem, they also help us to analyse the cause of the problem so we can address it quickly and effectively. This level of intelligence is crucial to improving and maintaining productivity levels.

“For example, we were having problems with jams in the necker machine (which creates a ‘neck’ in a can to reduce the diameter in readiness for the can end to be added). We needed to understand what factors were contributing to the problem; the Citect system allowed us to break up the machine’s performance by crew, product and can size and helped us determine the cause.

“The system also assisted in understanding the issues associated with ‘slow running’ of the decorator at the Revesby plant. This machine could potentially handle 1700 cans/min but often ran slower than this for extended lengths of time.

“As a result of the analysis provided by the Citect systems, we’ve uncovered differences among crews (which has led us to changes in training activity) and differences between the various products, which has resulted in changes in how we set the plant up for those products,” said Winning.

The operations team is also able to use the information produced by the Citect systems to justify further investment in plant.

“We have such good downtime analysis we can use this to assist in the justification of capital,” Winning said. “We know what improvements we are looking for in new equipment and we can confirm we are getting the expected results.”

Winning said the monitoring and analysis software also greatly reduced the amount of time it took him to collect, collate and review performance figures for his reports to division.

“We are able to extract information from the Ampla system in a couple of minutes compared to the couple of days it took under our old manual system. And we can now do plant-by-plant comparisons to provide a performance benchmark across the business.”

Citect Pty Ltd
www.citect.com