Industrial Automation

Industrial Automation

Mayonnaise Manufacturer Expands Production Capacity With Oil Delivery System Upgrade

Japan’s leading manufacturer of mayonnaise, salad dressings, sauces, marinades and related products developed a plan to expand sales of their name brand products in the United States. A division of this company that manufactures and private labels these products embarked upon a wide-ranging upgrade project in order to keep up with the production volume increases.

The customer identified a number of process improvement areas and created a three-year upgrade plan for the plant. In particular, the customer focused on improving safety, product quality and production efficiency, while eliminating operator errors and reducing waste. The company selected Omron to manage and coordinate these efforts.

The need

One of the main targets of the plant upgrade was the oil delivery process. Several issues existed with this process, including inconsistency in the amount of oil delivered, problems with maintaining the proper temperature during delivery, the inability to delivery oil to multiple mixers at the same time, and the commingling of different oils.

Since the existing system fed only one mixer line, it could not effectively support the new lines that were added as the plant grew. In fact, the system reached its limit at four lines, and initial modifications had a negative impact on production capacity, product quality and safety concerns.

While new lines were installed on the plant floor, the manufacturer’s range of products also changed over time. Instead of one type of oil, five different types of oil (including organic oil) were now required. Unfortunately, this caused the different oil types to commingle. The plant considered a purging process to remove all of the oil from the pipes each time a different oil was required, but this wasted significant amounts of oil in addition to time.

The solution

Omron supported the customer with the design and implementation of a new oil delivery system with greater throughput, higher accuracy and improved temperature controls. This included a complete redesign of the existing piping as well as the installation of new oil chillers. To meet production demands, new buffer oil tanks were installed to make sure enough chilled oil was available for quick adaptation Mayonnaise Manufacturer Expands Production Capacity with Oil Delivery System Upgrade to shifting production schedules.

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