Planning and traceability in production ensures full control from start to finish
Danish Crown and Intelligent Systems have entered into a collaboration to replace the existing MES (Manufacturing Execution System), that controls production at the slaughterhouse in Horsens – Europe’s biggest and the world’s third-largest slaughterhouse for pigs.
The replacement is part of the general update of the production plant and also for future-proofing the technological platform. The traceability and transparency that the system provides helps to link orders and production together, so you can track the pig from arrival, along the way and till the finished product is ready for the consumer.
When a truck with pigs for slaughter arrives at the slaughterhouse, the pigs are already registered in Danish Crown’s SAP ERP system, where order processing, sales, purchasing, inventory management and financial systems are tied together. The pigs are unloaded and prepared for slaughter. The pigs are registered individually in the MES system, which tracks and documents the transformation of raw product into finished goods.
Intelligent Systems delivers a new intelligent MES solution, which connects the individual production systems in the slaughterhouse together with Danish Crowns ERP and economy system, so the slaughterhouse can constantly optimize production for the most valuable cuts and have traceability and transparency across production.
The factory in Horsens can receive up to 110,000 slaughter pigs weekly, which are cut into smaller cuts. The smaller cuts can also be traced, so one can always go back to the individual pig and trace it through the entire process to the final end product.
To achieve the required performance with the large amounts of data that the production creates and at the same time ensure scalability and flexibility, the new solutions’ architecture is based on Micro Services, which communicate with the process systems via a central Message Bus. It will work as one coherent connected and integrated intelligent system that can function with minimal human interaction – this truly is the epitome of Industry-4.0.