The poultry industry is highly globalised. On the one hand, this opens additional opportunities to cut costs and to conquer new sales markets, but on the other hand, supply chains spanning the entire globe entail serious risks for the profitability.
Given the generally low prices, an insufficient availability of raw materials, inefficient use of raw materials and bad quality can prove to be fatal. Prices too high in relation to the quality, cutting of the wrong animals or supply difficulties of fattening farms are typical cost drivers.
Improving Margins
Digital solutions enable the poultry processors to meet these challenges systematically and in a highly efficient manner. The optimisation of raw material use and raw material availability by means of targeted cutting and packing management plays a decisive role. Another central issue is a flexible pricing that is based on the determination and verification of quality parameters for the payment of fattening farms and that defines a quality-based price for every flock.
How a medium-size enterprise became one of the most innovative poultry vendors in the Baltic region
From rearing to the production of over 240 products, the Eastern European poultry producer covers the entire production cycle. Besides the domestic market, the company supplies Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands and aims to be the most innovative vendor in the Baltic region.
Compliance with strict EU quality standards and a highly efficient production are essential for achieving this goal. According to the company, one prerequisite is a homogeneous digital environment with standardised interfaces between ERP systems, machines, and equipment.
The company chose the solutions by CSB and combined them with its group-wide ERP system. The overall solution ensures maximum transparency and consistency: Double entries and input errors are ruled out, weak points and potential problems can be identified and fixed immediately thanks to the integrated architecture, thereby reducing the operating costs substantially. What is more, the production can be adjusted smoothly and fast to new market trends as well as to new regulatory requirements.
The use of the CSB-System also enables comprehensive automation of the processes with full inventory and production control. As a result, throughput times were reduced considerably, productivity saw a double-digit increase, quality was improved, and the error rate was reduced drastically. Lastly, the company is now able to guarantee specific product features due to the audit-proof traceability of all process steps and raw materials, for example antibiotic-free animal rearing and feeding.
Preventing disruptions
A continuous monitoring of production and packaging machines enables critical incidents to be identified at an early stage using automatically generated key figures.
Fully automatic and complex production lines working at high speed have become a reality in today’s poultry processing facilities. But the high degree of automation also is a risk factor: Machine failures or other incidents in production are often hard to identify and remedy in advance. Clear automated reporting and escalation routines are frequently non-existent. Consequently, removing irregularities in machine operations often costs a lot of time and money.
The solution lies in the continuous monitoring of production and packing machines, as this helps to identify critical incidents at an early stage by means of automatically generated indicators. In this context, the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) plays a vitally important role as it can help to reduce production downtime to a minimum and eliminate machine failures by preventive maintenance planning. In this way, significant advantages can be achieved for the overall effectiveness and the quality of production.
This is a sponsored post by CSB-System. For case studies from CSB-System, visit the website, YouTube or LinkedIn.
