FreeWeigh.Net

Food for Thought – Reduced Overfilling Costs by 20 Percent

A $1 billion+ distributor of Hispanic foods realized its quality control processes had lagged behind company growth. To reduce overfilling and ensure legal compliance, FreeWeigh.Net® software helps Goya realize a 20 percent reduction in overfill cost.

Goya Foods, founded by Spanish immigrant Purdencio Unanue Ortiz to serve a local market for quality foods from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain, had long relied on a primarily paper-based quality control system in their factory. Operators pulled samples, weighed them, and recorded results by hand. In its current company iteration, Goya Quality Control Manager Carolina Rivera then gathered their handwritten forms and painstakingly entered results into Excel for analysis.

The system was cumbersome at best. Without real-time feedback on the actual process, lines might run for a significant period of time resulting in overfilling. At that time, overfilling to ensure Goya stayed ahead of legal guidelines and pleased customers was the norm.

Enhanced productivity and profitability

As Goya exceeded the billion-dollar annual sales goal for 2010, Rivera and her team began asking some simple questions: Could they ensure traceability, provide legal compliance, and enhance productivity and profitability? Jack Algieri of Atlantic Scale Company, a METTLER TOLEDO representative, spoke with her about Goya’s quality control issues and recommended the statistical process and quality control software FreeWeigh.Net.

Goya decided to connect their ID30 terminals and PBA429 platforms to FreeWeigh.Net. Ultimately, eight random sampling stations and three checkweigher clients were installed, removing the paper and pencil from the operator’s hands and allowing these skilled employees to focus on other value-added production issues. Now FreeWeight.Net provides one software interface to analyze in-motion and static samples. Rivera easily monitors the whole process from her office and receives a detailed trend analysis by way of various pre-installed reporting tools.

Real performance impact

Rivera says she feels confident in the performance of Atlantic Scale and METTLER TOLEDO. “It has been a pleasure dealing with Atlantic Scale,” she says. “They have taken us step by step through the implementation and are always more than willing to assist us when needed. The investment has been easily justified when comparing the initial project cost with the yearly cost of overfills,” she adds. “We’ve seen a significant reduction in our overfill cost since implementing METTLER TOLEDO’s FreeWeigh.Net.”

Key customer benefits

• Significant reduction of product overfill cost
• Compliance with legal-fill requirements
• Standardized and simplified processes
• Online monitoring and alarming
• Short reaction time in production
• Automated reporting
• Scalable system implementation and enhancement
• ERP integration
• Fast ROI (<12 months)

Contact us to learn more or for a demonstration of FreeWeigh.Net