Sugar Producer Streamlines Factory Operations with Jitterbit

Business Challenge

TPC, one of the five largest sugar producers in Tanzania, East Africa, grows and produces its own sugar on a 16,000-hectacre estate. For nine months out of the year, the factory is running 24/7, producing brown sugar, molasses and other products. To ensure product quality, continual laboratory analysis is conducted, often hourly — roughly 770 different analyses per day, each with multiple inputs.

This data was originally housed in Excel files, which were highly labor intensive and prone to crashing. This system created data access issues, as well as data accuracy problems: Inaccurate or missing inputs often skewed factory data, making decision-making difficult. As requirements from various departments continued to mount, TPC began looking for a way to gather, house and report information on factory throughput, quality and efficiency—one that could be maintained without hiring outside help.

Solution

After investigating off-the-shelf solutions and finding them cumbersome, difficult to work with and dependent on outside maintenance, TPC realized a custom app would better meet its needs—and a colleague recommended they look into Jitterbit.

Due to the small size of TPC’s team and the 24/7 uptime requirements during the growing season, the company hired consultants to help develop what would come to be known as the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS).

Prior to LIMS, the factory worker doing analysis would record the metrics captured on a piece of paper, or even their hand. After they finished the multistep process, they’d go in person to someone sitting in front of an Excel sheet and try to read what they’d written half an hour before.

LIMS brings all this data into a single source of truth, allowing TPC to see all current and past analysis; processes pending, in progress, completed or stopped; and duration and notes on stoppages or noncompletes. LIMS makes it easy to set up new products, and automatically creates slots for data input based on the frequency selected.

Workers performing analysis have access to an interface that displays the pre-defined recipes and a step-by-step guide to performing the data analysis directly on the input pages. One step must be completed before moving to the next—and once all data is captured, output metrics are calculated automatically on the back end. This data, in turn, rolls up to TPC’s Factory Total Efficiency time, a calculation of how effectively the entire factory is running.

Results

After just two years, LIMS has already produced big wins at TPC. The creation of an unmanned Weigh Bridge Alert System app sends early alerts when shipments are overweight, helping avoid damage to equipment. As the sugar cane makes its way through the refining process, workers can flag instances of stoppage, underproduction or other issues, enabling them to be quickly addressed.

App Builder is definitely something that has empowered our company to build the apps and solutions that it needs without a lot of outside help… We tried a lot of different applications and platforms, but nothing gave us the freedom that App Builder does.

Jaco Kilian, Business Systems Analyst, TPC

The step-by-step instructions in the LIMS analysis process have decreased training requirements, accelerating onboarding of new factory workers. And by attaching data to an employee name, LIMS has also helped build accountability. TPC can now more easily isolate issues in the data, as well as spot opportunities for additional training.

The speed with which TPC’s three-person team can add or make changes to apps has made it easy to continue to unify operations. Given the huge change to processes, buy-in among factory workers wasn’t immediate — but now that they’ve adopted the system, other departments are beginning to see the possibilities, too. One employee who’d heard about LIMS requested that the help desk become part of the system, and today the help desk app runs across the fields, the factory, the garage and IT, offering quick responses to issues.

“We basically have a blank canvas,” Jaco Kilian, Business Systems Analyst, TPC said. “Yes, there are some limitations to some of the things we can and can’t do, but it’s ultimately this blank canvas where you can do your own analysis. You can apply this to that. You can maintain it in house, you’re not dependent on outside consultants, and you don’t have to change your processes to fix a system.”