The South African Breweries Ltd Selects Lighthammer
Lighthammer, supplier of the world’s first and only platform for operational excellence, today announced that The South African Breweries Ltd (SAB), a wholly owned subsidiary of SABMiller plc, has selected Lighthammer Collaborative Manufacturing Suite (CMS) as its standard platform for production reporting. SAB’s production reporting application focuses on the “Performance Management” pillar of Operational Excellence. With this agreement, Lighthammer CMS will be deployed in brewing operations throughout South Africa.
The objective of this deployment is to provide a common platform for developing and delivering production reports at a regional level. Lighthammer CMS provides SAB users with personalized views of information and reports based on the disparate data sources and applications such as their process historian, batch management, LIMS, Product tracking and other legacy applications. With Lighthammer CMS, the source data is not moved or replicated so the manufacturing data is leveraged throughout the organization while preserving its integrity and simplifying the process. This insures that each user’s view of the information is based on accurate data and their views are based on the most up-to-date information available. More accurate and timely information yields more proactive workers.
“We were looking for a common platform upon which we could create production reports, using multiple data sources that were re-usable and could be transported across regions and sites. They had to be easy to create, configure and use as well as be web-based, requiring no special software for viewing. This requirement was driven by an insatiable need for context specific production information at a brewery level,” stated Garth Basson, Manufacturing Systems Manager of SAB. “Lighthammer CMS met those needs,” continued Mr. Basson.
With established reporting standards, users at the regional level can create reports with the same look and feel as the divisional reports. Breweries have very specific reporting needs, driven by their current focus areas that are not necessarily of general interest across the company. With the reporting platform in place, the regional brewery resources can focus on the brewery reports that serve their specific needs, yet comply with divisional standards. The regions now “own” their reporting requirements.
By standardizing on a single platform for production reporting, only one set of skills for reporting needs to be maintained which has the added benefit that staff with reporting skill sets are transportable across the entire organization. As a result, the pool of development resources for report building has increased as well.
Commented Stephen Cloughley, Vice President of International Operations for Lighthammer, “A number of SAB’s sites have been customers of Lighthammer for over three years, and during that time derived tremendous benefit from our basic visualization capability. This growth of our relationship to the corporate level will propagate our software across all sites in South Africa, and extend its value corporation-wide to include visualization of Key Performance Indicators and quality analysis.”
SAB has assembled an organization to monitor and maintain production reporting standards. The tools and data access provided by the Lighthammer platform facilitate the definition and adherence to reporting standards, with data access and data visualization templates that may be transported between sites and servers to maximize reuse. This standards organization meets quarterly to discuss progress, standards and other issues.
Background information:
SABMiller plc
SABMiller plc is one of the world’s largest brewers, with 2003/04 lager sales volumes in excess of 137 million hectolitres. It has a brewing presence in over 40 countries across four continents and a portfolio of strong brands and leading market shares in many of the countries in which is has brewing operations. Outside the USA, SABMiller plc is one of the largest bottlers of Coca-Cola products in the world.
In the year ended 31 March 2004, the group generated US $1,391 million pre-tax profit from a turnover of US $12,645 million. SABMiller plc is listed on the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges.
About Lighthammer(R), a privately held corporation headquartered in Exton, PA., is the leading supplier of Manufacturing Intelligence and Collaborative Manufacturing software products. Lighthammer’s Collaborative Manufacturing Suite (CMS) is the world’s first and only composite application platform for manufacturing. Lighthammer CMS provides all of the capabilities required to rapidly develop and deploy operational excellence and real-time performance management composite applications. Lighthammer software is currently in use at hundreds of companies worldwide and has been selected by more than 100 of the Fortune 500 manufacturers as their Collaborative Manufacturing solution
Further information on Lighthammer and its products can be found at www.lighthammer.com .
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Lighthammer, Illuminator, Xacute and all other Lighthammer products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lighthammer Software Development.
