Digital Innovation Transforms Efficiency and Quality at Siegwerk

Siegwerk is a global provider of printing inks and coatings for packaging applications and labels. Headquartered in Germany, the company operates in approximately 30 countries and has been in the chemical manufacturing sector for nearly 200 years.

In recent years, the company has embarked on a significant digital transformation project, specifically focusing on automation at its manufacturing plants.

“This initiative began three years ago with a comprehensive evaluation of our global shop floors to identify high-impact areas that could enhance efficiency, productivity, and speed of delivery to customers, while also improving product quality,” says Jatinder Bansal, CIO for Asia at Siegwerk.

The plant in Bhiwadi, India, which spans 75,000 square metres and houses several shop floors, was the starting point for this initiative. Bansal started by meticulously assessing the entire production cycle, beginning with the process order generated by the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Traditionally, process orders were printed and manually distributed to shop floor personnel, with supervisors planning production schedules and assigning machines based on these orders. Each order contains crucial information about required ingredients, including ratios, operation sequences, blending temperatures, and pressures.

“This reliance on paper documentation resulted in major quality control issues, with up to 50% of problems arising from incorrect material dosing due to human error in selecting or measuring materials,” says Bansal.

The company also faced difficulties in tracking the progress of materials as they moved through different machines in the production line. Without a clear method to monitor the completion of operations and subsequent transitions between machines, inefficiencies persisted.

Bansal also identified the need to optimise machine parameters like temperature, pressure, and viscosity, which were historically monitored and adjusted manually by experienced operators based on intuition rather than data-driven justification.

By leveraging advanced digital technologies, Bansal decided to enhance material dosing accuracy and improve tracking throughout production, thereby significantly reducing quality issues and moving closer to zero defects.

Leveraging In-house Expertise

“In the process industry, we encountered challenges with existing manufacturing execution systems (MES) from Rockwell and Siemens, which, while robust, are often costly and mainly designed for discrete manufacturing, requiring extensive and expensive customisation for the process industry,” Bansal says.

To address these challenges, he decided to develop an in-house solution. A successful pilot project was conducted with a vendor in Germany to automate the shop floor. Following this, Siegwerk began developing its own application with a dedicated team in India.

Initially, the team consisted of three developers and two functional experts. It took approximately 9 to 10 months to complete the development using the .NET framework.

“We opted to host the application on-premises rather than in the Cloud to avoid potential global network dependencies and latency issues that could disrupt production. To ensure operational continuity, we installed a local server that downloads process orders for at least 24 hours of operations. This setup allows us to maintain factory operations even during global network outages,” says Bansal.

Implementing Digital Solutions for Material Dosing and Tracking

The new application, in conjunction with tablets, barcodes and real-time monitoring came across as a comprehensive digital solution to address bottlenecks in material dosing and tracking.

The automated digital system helped the planners to create production schedules on a centralised dashboard, which is immediately accessible to shop floor workers via tablets installed near each scale. There is no paper usage anymore.

For material identification and dosing, a barcode system for all raw materials was implemented, eliminating the risk of manual selection errors.

“The system allows the operator to proceed with dosing only if the scanned material matches the process order. If the wrong material is selected or the quantity is outside tolerance limits, the system blocks the order and requires supervisor intervention. This ensures correct materials are used in proper proportions, significantly reducing quality issues from dosing errors,” says Bansal.

The digital system provides real-time monitoring and alerts, continuously tracking the dosing process with visual cues (red, amber, green bars) to indicate if material quantities are within tolerance. If dosing exceeds tolerance, the system alerts the operator and blocks further progress until a supervisor resolves the issue.

“By implementing these digital solutions, we have achieved a high level of control over the material dosing process, ensuring accuracy, reducing quality issues, and improving overall efficiency,” says Bansal.

IBRS highlights that attaining visibility into operations is a significant challenge. Even minor delays in one part of a processing chain can lead to cascading delays throughout the entire system. For example, during a collaboration with a medical product manufacturer, IBRS discovered that a brief delay of just a few seconds caused by new software at one stage of production resulted in a critical failure in the overall production process. Such delays are often difficult for humans to detect.

The new solution developed by Bansal and his team also helped overcome another significant challenge. Historically, shop floor workers found it tedious to manually document planned versus actual material quantities in the SAP system accurately, leading to discrepancies between planned and actual amounts.

The automated system captures material quantities in real-time and updates SAP records, eliminating manual data entry while ensuring accurate information on material usage.

Bansal introduced a ‘milestone confirmation’ feature, requiring shop floor personnel to confirm activity completion at each machine before proceeding. This allows operators to flag completed tasks with timestamps, enabling monitoring of time spent at each stage and identification of workflow delays.

“Since implementing these systems, we have observed significant improvements across several key performance indicators,” Bansal says.