MES system Henkel Sealant Uses a Siemens MES System to Rationalize Production and Cut Paperwork

Every year Henkel Sealant’s Hannover site produces 30 million cartridges filled with a wide variety of adhesives and sealants, including many customized products. A new manufacturing execution system (MES) from Siemens has slashed the amount of paperwork, improved order management and increased production efficiency, not least by reducing the opportunities for errors.

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The Henkel plant in Hannover has produced sealants and adhesives since the 1950s. Nowadays the plant makes joint sealing products, glues and PU construction foam for DIY and industry applications. The need to produce 30 million cartridges a year, including a wide variety of customized products, made production management very complex. In the past, the 250 to 350 weekly orders were scheduled in an SAP add-on and transferred to Excel spreadsheets. For each of the six bulk production lines and nine filling lines, production paperwork was issued and printed from SAP. With each production order requiring up to 15 pieces of paper, every week the production staff had to print, distribute and process 1,500–2,000 production documents. Data acquisition was also time-consuming, since it was done manually on printed sheets: one version for the production protocol and another known as the OEE (“overall equipment effectiveness”) capture sheet.

Wanting to increase production efficiency, improve order management and reduce paperwork, Henkel planned to install an MES. Other benefits of the MES were expected to be better traceability in production and increased online visibility, with real-time information on production quantities and equipment status. Henkel planned to use this data to detect errors and carry out root cause analysis through which it could reduce waste and customer rejects. Henkel chose Siemens to create an MES solution based on its Simatic IT range that would synchronize order and material data with SAP and help to optimize production management.

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