Flying Changeover

By Timo Frankl, Director of Sales, IT Solutions, Krones

Konolfingen in Switzerland. Home to Nestlè’s Competence Centre for infant and health foods. As part of a comprehensive facility expansion project, Krones was given full responsibility for installing two identically designed filling lines to handle special powdered milk for baby food. This overall responsibility, however, was not restricted to the machinery being deployed and its technical harmonisation, but also subsumed the IT used for optimising the lines concerned – a complex task involving the coordination and integration of all machines and the associated software.

In each of the two canning lines and the two pouching lines, Krones installed an order management system and a line documentation system, each of which exchange data with Nestlé’s superordinate MES (Manufacturing Execution System). One of the major challenges involved was to coordinate the large number of machines from other manufacturers (OEMs) and to support them in providing the requisite data. Here, Nestlé quite deliberately put its trust in Krones as the sole interfacing contractor, and in our filling and packaging competence, thus avoiding any interfacing problems in the event of faults or defects. Krones IT-S was thus not only the supplier of the package concerned, but also the consultant when it came to the challenges involved in terms of filling and packaging technology. This successful consultancy work has already contributed towards follow-up orders from the Nestlé Group.

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