Our quality has come alive

• Wendy Beks, Senior Laboratory Technician at Berry Global implemented the Quality Intelligence system AlisQI in just four months, with only 3 days of support from AlisQI
• AlisQI now saves 10 hours a week in data cleansing alone
• All process data, quality data & statistics are now available in one place: in AlisQI

In June 2019, one of the European facilities of Berry Global, a world leader in plastics, packaging and non-woven specialty materials, implemented a modern Quality Management platform.

The plant in question, located in the Netherlands, had been acquired in 2015 by Berry Global as part of its $2.5bn takeover of Avintiv, a specialist in hygiene and personal care products that had only just undergone a corporate rebrand and restructuring itself.

Beks has come to realize that ERP never delivers effective Quality Management.

“With any ERP system, Quality is tricky,” she says. “I was involved in the development of Oracle as the successor of our own custom-made ERP on an IBM AS/400 computer. You have to put in a whole new quality routing, which means you are effectively starting from scratch. Then we looked at JDEdwards. Same problem. Oracle and JDEdwards don’t have a quality module so it’s up to you to devise everything.”

This is where AlisQI has been the most transformative: all data is accessible to everyone in one central place. “All over the company, we have cupboards with boxes of files, and computers of course where we keep the folders with our ‘stuff’ …”

Beks starts to import all data going back to 2016. Having all data in one central place saves Beks and her team a lot of time. Before AlisQI, typing errors, improper data entry, and incorrect certificates had to be corrected: “this took us 10 hours a week.”

Customization is another transformative functionality in AlisQI.

Beks explains. “You can determine for each user what he or she gets to see. Operators don’t need to see 30 choices. Only their production lines and dashboards.

Team leaders have the authorization to see a lot more yet without the authorization to adjust the results. Because if something is off-spec, you do not want that data changed. And if this inadvertently happens, you have traceability. There is an audit trail for everything, including your spec history, so you can identify exactly when something was changed, and by whom.”

Beks has come to realize that ERP never delivers effective Quality Management.

Trend analysis required a lot of hard work and patience with the inevitable that Berry had less than adequate insight into the development of quality. “Process engineers spent a long time on specification evaluations,” says Beks. “Someone had to get a year’s worth of data out of the system, this had to go into Excel, the errors had to be weeded out, you put your graph on top of it, and then - finally - you checked this against your spec.”

As we mentioned earlier, ERP systems are not made to run Quality Management and with AlisQI, Beks would argue, Berry no longer needs it for this purpose. Quality Management has escaped from the straitjacket of a technological legacy that was both fragmented and rigid.

AlisQI is able to overcome the limitations of existing systems by being extremely flexible and customizable. This Beks discovered during the pilot.

The AlisQI software is so approachable that Berry’s senior electro-engineer, Rini Roijendijk, was able to connect the platform to their Siemens WinCC data acquisition system without any previous experience. This integration with the AlisQI API was crucial because it gave everyone at Berry access to real-time data.

Roijendijk explains: “For every machine, at five-minute intervals, I generate a text file in WinCC with the variables I want to read. A program of just 10 lines of code sends this to AlisQI.”

Another colleague instrumental in the success of AlisQI is process engineer Hendrik Reynvaan who played a key role in introducing the factory floor to the benefits of AlisQI.

“We had real-time data before but it was highly fragmented,” Reynvaan says. “With AlisQI, it is accessible and transparent, also for our operators who finally have a statistical tool to interpret quality data. How is that data distributed? How reliable and accurate is it? You can show your operators and process engineers trends, which gives them a lot more insight into their own data. It’s great.”

Reynvaan organized an awareness meeting where he let the operators loose on AlisQI - to play with the data, explore the possibilities - to give them ownership of the new system.

Customization is another transformative functionality in AlisQI.

Beks and her colleagues have achieved a lot in the four months since AlisQI was implemented. But they are not resting on their laurels.

One of Beks’ near-term goals is to generate all certificates out of AlisQI and use the platform to oversee incoming deliveries.

The Quality team is deciding whether to assign the entire job to AlisQI or to take a shortcut by simply adding the certificate as an appendix to each delivery.