A collaboration between Siemens and AkzoNobel transformed a £100m factory in Ashington, to connect the entire manufacturing process horizontally and vertically, allowing for the end-to-end digitization of the plant and for the plant to achieve new levels of speed and efficiency.
Covering an area of 100,000m² the facility also has capacity to expand in order to support future growth plans.
These improvements have reduced the time to market by 85%, from three months to just two weeks. With this change, the plant can now produce up to 33,000 different colors across a range of AkzoNobel brands.
The result is that the plant is efficiently producing paint in a pre-determined order, based on input availability and machine performance, and that every activity, from the ordering of raw materials to the shipping of finished products, can be initiated without human intervention.
“The reason that we wanted to utilize the automation technology was to meet the ever-increasing production needs of our customers, continue to meet the safety regulations in the chemical and manufacturing industries, but also to achieve our own sustainability goals of reducing waste, reusing energy and using less solvent,” Jeff Hope, AkzoNobel’s head of the manufacturing unit at AkzoNobel Ashington, said.
The plant also aims to reuse 100% of its water and 90% of solvents back into the process once the materials have been treated in the onsite by-products plant.
Meanwhile, a biomass boiler and solar panels onsite produce 10% of the energy needed to power the plant, and any rainwater harvested is also used in the production process.
AkzoNobel estimates that the carbon footprint per liter of paint produced at Ashington has reduced by 50%, compared to the facilities it has replaced.
The solution at Ashington, which combines Siemens’ technology with AkzoNobel’s enterprise business system, connected every manufacturing process vertically and horizontally, allowing the entire factory to communicate and become automated. In addition, operations such as delivery, logistics, and customer relations are managed by the business system from SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products).
Eric Bennison, account development manager at Siemens Digital Industries, said: “By utilizing digitization tools we’ve worked with AkzoNobel Ashington to deliver their unique vision to be able to give them a fully integrated, completely connected and automated plant.