Yanghe Distillery

Opcenter solutions help leading global distilled spirits maker in digital transformation

Yanghe Distillery improves production efficiency and quality and reduces costs with Siemens APS, MES, and LIMS technology

In 2018, Yanghe began the digital transformation of manufacturing with the 5211 Smart Factory Project, which included six major focus areas: planning, production, quality, laboratory, equipment and cost accounting.

Yanghe’s objectives for the project included standardization of production and operation, visualization of production processes, intelligent production scheduling, automated process control, refined production cost accounting and quality traceability.

Yanghe expects the project to enable its supply chain to improve coordination from dealers to first-level suppliers with seamless information flow from the production plan to product delivery. The project aims to improve the entire process of quality tracking and management through supplier materials quality, production efficiency and reduced manufacturing costs and equipment failures.

Business and technical challenges – Yanghe has diverse products and complex business processes. In researching the digitalization project, the company identified more than 100 issues in planning, production, quality, equipment and finance and more than 40 opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce cost.

One example is an on-site packaging workshop that complies with inspection standards and procedures at all levels, including in-process quality control (IPQC), final product quality control (FQC), outgoing quality control (OQC) and laboratory sampling. One of the challenges was that inspection data was recorded and circulated in hardcopy form, which could not support rapid response to inspection results and efficient management.

Another example is the typical flow-based process of liquor production. Each packaging line has a corresponding product process, and the line has a coding system for product traceability and outbound and minbound services. Because Yanghe used manual records, factory management lacked transparency.

Yanghe also faced a technical challenge: the production equipment was very old, and many machines could not directly collect data and did not operate under automated controls. Much of the equipment was undergoing a transformation to automation. Multiple systems were applied for equipment cooperation, with multiple interfaces.

Selecting Opcenter solutions – After Yanghe’s plan for the digital factory was approved, the company evaluated several solution providers in China and abroad. Siemens Opcenter™ solutions satisfied the overall system structure, and the final cooperative agreement was confirmed after coordination between Yanghe, Shanghai H-VISIONS Technology, a Siemens business partner, and Siemens.

The implementation of Opcenter Execution Process at Yanghe delivered obvious improvements through the replacement of manual operations with automated software control and through integrated devices and data.

To implement the smart factory project, Yanghe replaced a scheduling process that had relied on spreadsheets with Opcenter APS software. Integrating the capabilities of the software with Yanghe’s business processes, the project team developed rules for scheduling required materials and equipment while minimizing overall setup times for production. Yanghe also defined key performance indicators (KPIs) and their reporting requirements.

The implementation of Opcenter Execution Process at Yanghe delivered obvious improvements through the replacement of human operations with automated software control and through integrated devices and data, which collect production quantities and operation speeds of each process through automated instruments and equipment.

For quality inspection processes, Yanghe implemented Opcenter Laboratory capabilities for IQC inspection, barcode management, automatic scanning and OQC inspection to build a quality information collection system and a quality management platform, realizing quality traceability of the whole process from finished products and semi-finished products to raw materials.

The value of digitalization Yanghe’s smart factory digitalization project has delivered broad-ranging business benefits in a number of areas. Opcenter Scheduling helped the company automate scheduling and integrate the production schedule with its ERP system, its MES system Opcenter Execution Process and with its supplier relationship management (SRM) system. This enabled automated accounting of performance indicators such as capacity utilization, plan versus actual and on-time delivery.

By standardizing operations, Yanghe has established uniform standards for equipment interfaces and automated data collection that has improved manufacturing processes. The production line process status is now visualized and prominently displayed in the production facility, providing real-time visibility and transparency of KPIs such as material loss and qualified rates.

Yanghe has also improved financial controls by automating and refining production cost accounting. Through detailed analysis of equipment failures, material, man-hours, quality and other losses using real-time product cost data, the company can easily determine material, manufacturing, and equipment costs and analyze them on a year-to-year basis and report them at the business unit and order levels.

From a quality perspective, Yanghe can now trace quality data in a single query, from packaging materials to semi-finished products, from bulk liquor to finished product. The standardized quality business process, combined with the barcode technology applied to supplier materials, enables Yanghe to manage in detail material purchase, inspection and storage, issue of materials to production, and production losses. The quality standardization intelligently distributes inspection and automates second sampling inspection and other quality processes to maintain high quality.

Yanghe’s smart factory project has also leveraged Opcenter solutions to integrate planning, purchasing, supplier and production information to coordinate the supply chain. The company has applied digital and cloud computing technology to build an integrated platform for production, supply and marketing to go beyond automated production to real intelligent manufacturing.

Customer’s primary business
Yanghe Distillery has been included in the “Top 500 Chinese Companies” released by Fortune China for three years in succession and was named in the Financial Times Global 500 in 2012. The company was chosen in the BrandZ™ “Top 100 Most Valuable Chinese Brands” in 2014 and 2015 and ranked in third in the Brand Finance Spirits 50 in 2017.
www.yangheglobal.com