Lighthammer will be deployed in brewing operations throughout South Africa in support of South African Breweries’ (SAB) production reporting application focusing on the Performance Management pillar of Operational Excellence.
The deployment aims to provide a common platform for developing and delivering production reports at a regional level. Lighthammer Collaborative Manufacturing Suite (CMS) will provide SAB users with personalized views of information and reports based on the disparate data sources and applications such as their process historian, batch management, LIMS, Product tracking and other legacy applications.
In addition, SAB has assembled an organization to monitor and maintain production reporting standards. The tools and data access provided by the Lighthammer platform are expected to facilitate the definition and adherence to reporting standards, with data access and data visualization templates that may be transported between sites and servers to maximize reuse. This standards organization meets quarterly to discuss progress, standards and other issues.
Garth Basson, Manufacturing Systems Manager of SAB, said Lighthammer met the requirements set by the company: We were looking for a common platform upon which we could create production reports, using multiple data sources that were re-usable and could be transported across regions and sites. They had to be easy to create, configure and use as well as be web-based, requiring no special software for viewing. This requirement was driven by an insatiable need for context specific production information at a brewery level.
SAB hopes that by standardizing on a single platform for production reporting, only one set of skills for reporting needs to be maintained, which has the added benefit that staff with reporting skill sets are transportable across the entire organization. As a result, the pool of development resources for report building will be able to increase.
