Discover how Roger & Roger leverages Factry Historian and FactryOS to drive a culture of operational excellence, streamline data management across sites, and reduce costs.
Questions about this case? Contact us!Discover how Roger & Roger, a powerhouse in the Belgian snack industry, leverages Factry Historian and FactryOS to drive a culture of operational excellence, streamline data management across sites, and reduce costs. A collaboration with crispy results.
Chips and snacks producer Roger & Roger is an evergreen in the Belgian food industry, serving clients across Europe and beyond. It consists of two production sites, one in Mouscron, Belgium and one in Hungary. Other entities within the group include the factories of Dicofoods, which specialise in producing frozen vegetable products.
Over the years, Roger & Roger’s production site in Mouscron, Belgium, has deployed various digital initiatives. It leverages multiple systems such as ERP, WMS, and MES, each playing a designated role in the grand scheme of things. Yet, there was still one critical component missing: a powerful data historian.
Struggling with paper processes and static Excel sheets, the addition of a historian would enable them to collect and visualise process data in real-time, identify trends, patterns and improvement potential, and supply the management with accurate data to support their business decisions.
Their bigger goal? Use Factry Historian as a platform to unify their process data infrastructure, connect each production site, obtain cross-site insights, and establish a company-wide culture of continuous improvement.
Faced with a hefty surge in demand, Roger & Roger was eager to increase its operational capacity. Leveraging a historian for data analysis promised to refine their understanding of processes, enable them to address inefficiencies, and increase their overall productivity without having to buy new equipment.
The company manages a broad range of products and operations, while each of the sites has a different digital maturity level. Embracing a unified data strategy would not only streamline operational monitoring on the individual sites, but also pave the way for identifying company-wide efficiency improvements.
Reliance on manual data entry processes, such as for downtime registration and quality control, often led to errors, making automatic downtime attribution a key priority. Addressing complaints was time-consuming due to manual record searches, underscoring the need for streamlined, reliable data management.
Last but not least, it was of huge importance for Roger & Roger to have a fully self-sufficient solution, which would enable them to scale fast and cost-effectively to new production sites without needing external support. Additionally, the solution should avoid overlap with other software solutions.
Roger & Roger selected Factry Historian, complemented by the FactryOS Downtime Management module, as the holistic answer to their challenges.
With Factry Historian, we provided a Swiss-army-knife solution for industrial data collection, storage, and dashboarding, offering unmatched flexibility, scalability, and self-sufficiency, enabling them to become their own site integrator.
By enriching the historian with the FactryOS Downtime Management module, we covered the full scope of their needs with a solution that automatically attributes the reasons for downtime, while also allowing for manual data entry.
Integrating both products into a unified solution that blends like coffee and cream, this setup not only automates processes but also streamlines data management across sites, fulfilling their goal of seamless data integration.
Following a successful proof of concept, Roger & Roger was fully convinced.
Instead of relying on paper and Excel, operators and managers now get a real-time overview of the production line, along with KPIs, and can easily make adjustments as needed. For plant and operations managers, these screens and scoring boards serve as valuable tools for making data-driven decisions.
For example, when monitoring the cooking cycle of corn, historian data is crucial for real-time quality control. If there’s an issue, production staff can immediately delve into the exact, time-stamped cooking data. Having this data at their fingertips allows them to swiftly identify the root cause of problems.
Factry Historian has been instrumental in tackling our operational challenges. It has shifted us away from relying on gut feelings and makeshift Excel sheets to having real, actionable visibility.
Jan-Laurens Vandermeersch
Business Analyst Manufacturing at Roger & Roger
Monitoring remote sites is streamlined and effective, as demonstrated by the seamless integration of Roger & Roger’s counterpart plant in Hungary. Being a greenfield site, this allowed them to choose which tags to monitor from the outset, and apply standardised data structuring and reporting from day one.
Previously lacking automated data collection, process insights at the site were very limited. Yet, today, a focused set of real-time dashboards not only has a positive impact on the plant’s operational efficiency, it also enables managers across the group to follow up on the plant’s performance at a glance.
When scaling to a new production site in Hungary, armed with insights from our initial rollout in Belgium, we were able to embed an effective data model and reporting system from the outset.
Koen Van Ceulebroeck
IT Director at Roger & Roger
Meet Factry Historian
Through Factry Historians Event Module, specific production events, such as batches and operator shifts, are automatically identified and stored in a PostgreSQL database.
This automated data aggregation enables real-time, in-depth analysis through the company’s BI tools, facilitating the generation of comprehensive OEE reports, while also enhancing its process monitoring capabilities.
For example, if a machine shuts down during a shift, the event module logs this incident alongside relevant production data. Analysing these events helps identify patterns or issues, like frequent downtime during specific operations.
By complementing Factry Historian with the Downtime Management module of our MES solution FactryOS, the company has been able to automate downtime reason attribution. This is also a testament to the scalability of the MES, which can be modularly tailored to meet specific production needs.
Reasons for downtime are now automatically attributed based on real-time process and machine data, while still allowing for manual input by operators. Using tablets, operators can easily input data through a straightforward hierarchical structure — without the need for extensive knowledge or training.
Through oversight, and improved response times to issues, we’ve noticed a significant reduction in changeover times, especially in how quickly we now swap rolls of packing foil on our packaging machines..
Koen Van Ceulebroeck
IT Director at Roger & Roger
Implementing Factry Historian and FactryOS has elevated Roger & Roger’s approach to operational management. With real-time access to machine and process, and contextual data, they now leverage precise insights to optimise their production and business processes, enhancing decision-making.
Particularly at some sites, the transition from paper and spreadsheets to Factry Historian has been truly transformative. Starting often from scratch, data from equipment and processes are now visualised in dashboards that provide essential insights into current and past operations, downtime, and shifts.
Having once been a consultant in IT and MES implementation projects with similar functionality, I think Factry’s solutions are hard to beat in terms of flexibility, speed and cost-effectiveness.
Jan-Laurens Vandermeersch
Business Analyst Manufacturing at Roger & Roger
The implementation of Factry Historian led to significant cost savings by optimising processes, reducing downtime, improving resource allocation, and eliminating the need for additional equipment. Essentially, the company is achieving more with the resources they have, increasing their profit margins.
“Harvest now, analyse later” is Roger & Roger’s mantra. By capturing a wealth of data in a uniformly structured manner across 5 sites — ranging from machine efficiency to downtime and energy usage — they are establishing a robust data foundation for comprehensive site benchmarking and group-wide improvement.
Faced with a 20% production increase, Factry tools have revealed the key often lies not in acquiring more equipment but in optimising our existing processes. This has led to considerable cost savings.
Koen Van Ceulebroeck
IT Director at Roger & Roger
The solution facilitates the tracking and reporting of operational metrics, ensuring data accuracy and timeliness required for regulatory compliance. Auditors can access and verify compliance information effortlessly. Investigating client feedback in detail has become a matter of seconds, not hours.
If there’s a complaint, we can quickly access all related production and lab data 10 hours before and after production. What used to be a quest through piles of paper records now just takes a few clicks.
Koen Van Ceulebroeck
IT Director at Roger & Roger
