Scottish Courage goes for 'power assisted scheduling'

Scottish Courage Brewing, Britain’s £2 billion turnover beer company boasting brands like Fosters, John Smiths, Kronenbourg, Miller Pilsner and Theakstons, is in the final throes of a serious manufacturing and business IT transformation designed to handle ever more demanding market expectations. The firm, which produces over 10 million barrels of beer a year, upgraded from SAP’s old R/2 ERP to full R/3 last September – and is now implementing SAP APO (Advanced Planner and Optimiser) supply chain planning and SCT’s iProcess.sct (formerly Fygir) production scheduling package. It’s been quite an undertaking, and particularly on the scheduling side – all about improving visibility, speed, flexibility and efficiency. As David Spacey, Scottish Courage’s production operations planning manager, explains: “To maximise service levels and buffer against changing demand patterns we needed more confidence about not just what liquid is in pipes and tanks now, but also the forward view of our capability to supply.” And while that might not sound much, the sheer scale of operations and the timeframes make it a very big deal indeed. “Some beers take three weeks from brew launch to packaging and there are thousands of combinations of tanks, pipes and production lines, with batches at all stages of production. No-one orders on lead times like that: typically it’s a day or two, so planning is complex and constantly changing.” Beyond that he adds: “We also needed to speed up the time taken to schedule our breweries, to make us more agile. As demand feeds through we needed to be able to juggle resources better and more frequently without causing chaos.” It was a serious challenge. Processing times are variable, plant is complex and capacity- and time-constrained, there are strict liquid age criteria, customer demand moves during production, tank resources may not be well matched along the process, and there are opportunities to trade off optimised sequencing against wastage and meeting new customer orders. Additionally, like any manufacturing industry, plant can perform poorly or break down. “And just to make it a little more interesting, these are ‘real time’ processes,” says Spacey. “Each variation calls for immediate re-scheduling of tanks, pipes, filtering, packing and transport, as well as labour and materials. Given that we’re talking about handling a number of liquids concurrently, all with brews at different stages, and a requirement to buffer just enough to handle demand surprises, day-to-day scheduling is not trivial.” In terms of handling all this, Spacey says “we had R/2 as the business system and a hotch-potch of planning systems, mostly combinations of spreadsheets, as well as DRP systems and a wide range of other legacy systems.” While it all worked, it was limited, difficult to drive, time consuming, slow and meant, for example, that brewery scheduling had to be a once a week only operation. Although the whole infrastructure had been under review for “a number of years”, it was R/2’s near obsolescence that triggered the project in earnest. “R/3 was selected first,” he says, “for financials, materials management, warehouse management and the whole supply chain. We were one of SAP’s major users on R/2, but 2004 was going to be the end of its supported life. We knew its functionality lagged R/3, so it really was time to upgrade. We did consider other ERP vendors, but with a company this size, SAP was the obvious choice. I won’t give you transaction volumes but they’re scary. “Then we wanted integrated planning of our entire supply chain – all packaging and material suppliers, third party producers and the rest.” And hence APO, which goes live this month. He concedes that attempts to optimise complete supply chains are fraught with problems, mostly the result of cultures and the dynamics, but insists, “that’s part of the reason we selected APO. It’s interfaced with the live business transactions of R/3. So we can see production happening on the lines at third party suppliers, see them performing better or worse than anticipated. We can see vehicles leaving depots… everything.” And there’s more: Scottish Courage isn’t looking to APO to provide grand optimisations of what is a substantial, quite complex supply chain. Spacey says that although optimisation will be run, it will be infrequent. “Maybe monthly; we’re looking for optimisation to help us with longer term decision-making.” APO’s day to day objective is providing visibility of operations. And in that respect, he says although its functionality is “at an early stage compared with some of its competitors,” the big advantage is its tight integration with R/3. Planners have ownership Nevertheless, he adds: “there were a couple of areas where APO was limited and one was detailed scheduling. There was room for an additional system specifically for production planning.” And what’s interesting here is that whereas the ‘obvious’ choice, given the complexity, might have been an automated high level, high price tag, algorithmic optimisation system, in fact in January this year his team selected the apparently more ‘conventional’ iProcess.sct. “Rather than the algorithmic systems that just tell you what to do, we wanted exactly the opposite: we wanted our planners to have ownership – to be in control but assisted by the system.” Spacey is reluctant to name names, but says several alternatives were tested with real data, the deciding factor being how well they helped planners deal with real tasks and scenarios. “We looked at how they performed with detailed scheduling to meet daily demand, targeting liquid stock levels, a materials supply hiccup, demand spikes, QA failure, yeast planning, use of ‘residual’ liquid, and planning of maintenance breaks.” And of SCT he says: “We were impressed with the simplicity and power of its visualisation… Most systems major on the quality of the optimised solution and the algorithms used rather than the user interface. But we wanted a system that our planners could use without having degrees in astrophysics. iProcess.sct gives them a visual planning board – a glorified Gannt chart with ‘drag and drop’ of jobs. Although it draws up an initial schedule, the planning teams are in the driving seat: they can manipulate it and inject their own solutions.” And he adds: “The visual nature of the human interface also encourages involvement of production managers, which is critical to getting conformance to plan on the shopfloor. We call it ‘power-assisted planning’.” Six months after selecting SCT, Scottish Courage has already provided the facility to move up from weekly scheduling to daily on two of its five sites – each with ‘go lives’ just five weeks after implementation. Implementation of the first SCT system was at the Royal Brewery in Manchester, the second at Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, and Spacey says the results have been excellent. “It used to take up to eight hours to prepare a schedule the old way because the number of options is frightening: on a large site you can have up to 50,000 different routing options from launch of the brew to the packaging line. But now, a first stab comes up in 10 minutes, and the planner then has the option of improving on that.” At the moment iProcess.sct still needs initialising data in the form of the existing liquid stocks picture across the plant, but in the next three months this too will be automated, with the data linked “straight from R/3, APO and our bespoke Oracle liquid stock management system.” Spacey is clearly delighted: “The ability to rapidly and frequently re-schedule the flow of beer through the breweries and keep predicting which day, hour or even minute the beer will be available to start packaging is a key enabler of agility. And it avoids having packaging crews stood waiting for beer to package! “With the first two sites under our belt, we’re now rolling out iProcess.sct to Tyne Brewery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Fountain Brewery, Edinburgh; and Berkshire Brewery in Reading during the next three months. Most of the implementation effort will be borne by our own project team, made up of planners released for the project, with a reducing input from SCT consultants as our skills grow.”