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

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“Siemens is a worldwide vendor of a standards-based product and their modular and scalable functionality offers a future-proof and secure investment,” said Dr. Matthias Breithor, Henkel’s production manager in Hannover. To help the success of the project, employees from different areas were involved at an early stage, starting with a workshop organized by Siemens.

A user-friendly solution

It was essential that the new system had intuitive and user-friendly operator interfaces for the production staff. The project included touch panels on the mixers in the bulk production area and on the filling lines. The line operators use the touch panels to enter their order feedback and to report shift changeovers and breakdowns. Data for the 700 products, more than 120 different recipes and 5,000 unique materials — raw materials, packaging and finished goods — at Hannover is managed in SAP R/3. Simatic IT takes over the orders planned in the Henkel SAP add-on and shows them directly on displays next to the mixing and filling lines.

Easy handling of OEE data was a major requirement. The paper OEE record sheet is now a thing of the past: instead, whenever there is a disruption the operator now simply chooses the cause from a drop-down list on the touch screen. In future, Henkel plans to connect the OEE system directly to the equipment, so that error states are captured automatically. When an operator encounters an error in the master data a correction needs to be made only once, after which it applies to all subsequent production runs. This upgrades the value of the employee’s time and emphasizes his importance in helping to improve production.

Another advantage for the operators is that they no longer have to configure the inkjet printer which marks the filled cartridges with batch numbers and other production data. Previously the line manager had to do this for every batch, but now the MES system sets up the printer with no manual intervention.

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