Monitoring and validating Clean-in-Place (CIP) processes can be a complex, time-consuming, and costly process, particularly for relatively modest operations. However, production intelligence software powered by AI can make it significantly easier. That’s why a German dairy, processing more than two million liters of milk, turned to MontBlancAI for help.
Producing high-quality milk, cream, yogurt, cheese, and butter, the dairy relies on CIP to clean and sanitize equipment and pipelines, ensuring product hygiene, quality, and safety.
Was there a way to streamline and enhance the existing CIP processes? Let’s take a look.
The Challenge
The dairy’s primary goal was to monitor and validate hundreds of CIP processes to maintain both safety and quality. Optimizing existing resources was also a priority.
The individual challenges in play included:
Time-Consuming CIP Processes
The dairy’s existing CIP processes were cumbersome and time-consuming, requiring multiple people and staffing hours to monitor.
Delivering Consistent CIP Performance
The dairy needed to validate hundreds of daily CIP processes to ensure consistent hygiene and product quality across its equipment and pipelines.
Maintaining Compliance During Audits
Demonstrating compliance with industry standards during audits was challenging without continuous verification of CIP process execution.
Optimizing Resource Use
The dairy faced difficulties in identifying opportunities to reduce cleaning time and resource consumption, such as water, acid, and lye, in its CIP processes.
The Solution
This ambitious yet cautious dairy turned to our operational intelligence functions in order to find and address the solutions that would, ultimately, make its CIP processes more efficient and cost-effective.
The management team at the dairy took a systematic approach to enhancing its CIP processes that involved three key aspects of MontBlancAI’s production intelligence platform.
Integrated MontBlancAI’s Data Pipeline
The dairy connected its CIP machine’s S7 PLC to MontBlancAI’s proprietary data pipeline via an OPC-UA interface for real-time process monitoring.
Utilizing Process Validation Features
MontBlancAI’s process validation features enabled the dairy to train ML models to deliver ideal and optimized cleaning processes.
Streamlining with Intuitive Setup
The platform’s intuitive user interface was set up in under a day and allowed all staff to access and verify CIP process execution effortlessly.
The Outcome
Since partnering with MontBlancAI in Fall 2022, the leading German dairy has transformed its Clean-In-Place (CIP) processes, achieving significant operational and environmental improvements.
Hundreds of Saved Staffing Hours
By implementing MontBlancAI, the dairy was able to slash the annual staffing hours required to run operations, making the business significantly more profitable.
Enhanced Process Efficiency
MontBlancAI’s Process Validation features provided actionable insights, giving the dairy the ability to reduce cleaning time by hours across over 5,000 validated cleanings.
Conservation of Resources
The dairy saved thousands of cubic meters of fresh water, acid, and lye by identifying areas to reduce resource usage. This contributed to cost savings and sustainability goals.
Continuous Validation and Compliance
Integration with the dairy’s S7 PLC via an OPC-UA interface ensured real-time monitoring and validation of CIP processes. This provided verifiable proof of compliance during audits.
User-Friendly Implementation
The intuitive MontBlancAI system was set up in less than a day, allowing staff to easily select datapoints, create triggers, and validate cleaning processes.
Scalable Impact
The success of MontBlancAI prompted the dairy to use our production optimization software for additional CIP machines, enhancing operational efficiency and product quality.
By leveraging MontBlancAI, the dairy improved its CIP process consistency and achieved significant cost savings. There were also various environmental benefits.
Key Takeaways
The dairy’s successful project revealed some fascinating facts and insights that will help the operation become more efficient and profitable going forward.
- Improved CIP process efficiency reduces cleaning time significantly
- Production optimization software powered by AI has the potential to save thousands of cubic meters of water, acid, and lye.
- Real-time CIP validation promotes enhanced hygiene and safety.
- MontBlancAI delivers audit-ready compliance documentation.
Start Using Powerful Production Optimization Software Today
Transform your CIP processes, and you transform your entire operation. Start using our production intelligence platform today to reap the rewards with minimal hassle or effort.
More cases
Explore Additional Success Stories
Identifying Defects Early
A huge range of issues has the potential to delay, disrupt, and derail manufacturing operations. If you can identify these issues at the earliest opportunity, you can maintain an efficient production process. Traditional monitoring methods struggle to pick up issues such as performance deviations, short-term disruptions, and the failure of critical components such as filtration membranes. Our approach to predictive solutions provides a proven answer to this problem.
Optimize Dairy Production
Germany is home to one of the world’s most competitive dairy industries. The small and moderately-sized dairies in the country have to take every opportunity to make their operations more efficient and productive. This is a cost-effective and reasonably feasible way to compete with the large corporations. The pursuit of efficiencies and increased capacity plays a crucial role in this process, but traditional assessment methods are costly, time-consuming, and relatively unreliable.One relatively small dairy approached us due to our reputation for powerful production process monitoring software. The brief was simple: To decide whether optimizing existing equipment or investing in new machinery was the most cost-effective way forward.
UF System Optimization
A major production facility approached us to address the operational issues behind a significant downtime rating. When the facility’s management first assessed the situation, the maximum continuous runtime was a paltry 13 hours before a Cleaning-in-Place cycle was needed. The relatively low uptime witnessed was having a seriously detrimental impact on both operational efficiency and capacity. With the help of MontBlancAI, the team implemented a series of targeted optimizations using, among other things,AI-powered operational intelligence tools. As a result, the facility significantly increased overall efficiency and capacity. Here’s how they did it with the help of our cutting-edge operational intelligence tools.
Enhanced OEE
A manufacturing facility was struggling with filling line inefficiencies, despite seemingly stable monthly performance reports. Frequent, untracked short stops and unclear performance fluctuations were silently eroding productivity. By leveraging MontBlancAI’s advanced production monitoring tools, the facility uncovered and addressed these issues, delivering a remarkable 12.4% increase in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) within just six weeks. This case study details the challenge, the innovative approach, and the eventual results.
