Kettle expanding with SPC

Salem, Oregon  - Speciality potato crisp company Kettle Foods is constructing a new plant in in Wisconsin and expanding the existing facility at it Salem HQ as part of a strategy to compete with the mass production crisp producers.

Production of Kettles ‘artisan’ crisps involves combine batch cooking by experienced fryers, backed by adoption of SPC methods to maintain stable cooking characteristics and continuous process improvement. Therefore, as part of its market strategy, Kettle is expanding its use of SPC from a point monitoring system on the production line to larger scale process corporate management following a manufacturing analytics model.

Kettle has implemented SPC in the Salem plant with a combination of NWA Quality Monitor for data collection at the production line and NWA Quality Analyst for supervisory and management analytics and reporting. The direct process used includes incoming inspection of raw materials – potatoes, oil and seasonings ­– and handling process data at the fryers, the colour sorter, seasoning and packaging.

The move has increased Kettle’s control over all its process steps and delivered savings in areas such as reduction in overfill, a 50% drop in destructive testing and 25% reduction in rework and scrap. The system has also eliminated the usage of tonnes of paper.

All staff levels now more actively use SPC. Quality Analyst is used by everyone from plant floor operators to the technical director. Engineering and management are also using the data more actively.

For example, engineering easily uses all of the data to improve the process and enable process improvement when specifying new equipment. Previously, production had worked to specification limits and now works to statistical limits, understands process capability and focuses on the goal of reducing variability.

The NWA software has simplified monthly KPI analysis and reporting. The task used to consume one to two days, and now has been reduced to minutes. This has helped Kettle to start moving to a manufacturing analytics model and apply process management throughout enterprise functions.

The next step is to aggregate the data from all production management systems: IFS (ERP), Rockwell (SCADA) and NWA (quality), to produce role specific analytics and visualisation for everyone and give an enterprise view of what is happening in the total process. This will make all data actionable and change the perspective from looking behind to looking forward. This mindset will allow on-going expansion while maintaining artisan quality levels.