Industries

Leaner operations through integrated consumer packaged goods manufacturing

How can your consumer packaged goods (CPG) company efficiently develop and produce higher quality, more sustainable goods faster? Though this challenge is not new, the global environment in which you must operate today presents greater obstacles: consumer demands for greater product variety and immediate availability, tighter regulatory and traceability requirements, ongoing supply chain volatility, accelerated delivery schedules, and more. Thankfully, advances in digital manufacturing software address these issues and allow CPG manufacturers to achieve new quality, speed and cost objectives.

In our recent eBook titled “Going leaner in CPG manufacturing,” Siemens Digital Industries Software offers details on how integrated manufacturing operations management (MOM) software enhances lean operations. The rich functionality of our manufacturing execution system (MES) software combined with the comprehensive digital twin and native integration of a full-orbed MOM solution brings about accelerated product development and faster time-to-market, less waste, higher quality, greater efficiency, lower operational costs and more on-time deliveries to your consumers.

In this blog we hit the highlights, explaining how new MES and MOM capabilities enable you to go leaner – even in the face of an increasingly demanding and cost-competitive marketplace.

Where waste still hides

If your CPG company is like most, you have already implemented many lean practices, and this may cause you to wonder whether additional efforts will result in diminishing returns. This could be the case if you merely invest more time and energy on a waste stream that has already been reduced substantially. However, in our work with manufacturers from various CPG industries (food & beverage, cosmetics, cleaning products, other specialty chemicals and more), Siemens has observed how cross-departmental collaboration often uncovers waste that was previously overlooked. Such collaboration also frequently identifies a straightforward path to eliminating these additional waste streams.   

The eBook covers six cases in which CPG manufacturers have leveraged integrated MOM to achieve leaner operations. Here are the top three:

  1. Improved planning and scheduling – If your MES and advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems operate in separate silos, your manufacturing floor may have some efficiency gaps that are not visible with only APS or only MES data. Instead of requiring your team to manually access information from both systems, an integrated manufacturing solution enables faster, better informed decisions about production schedules. With real-time access to MES data, the APS schedule accounts for the current capacity of each line and balances capacity across lines as well as at different work stations. Conversely, with real-time access to APS data, the MES orchestrates production activities in accordance with the most up-to-date schedule. More balanced production results, helping to maximize your on-time, in-full (OTIF) performance.
  2. Better inventory staging – A standalone MES has probably made your supply and replenishment of raw materials more efficient through its resource allocation and control functionality. It manages and tracks the movement and storage of materials, in-process items and finished products, as well as the transfers between and within workstations. You can further enhance resource utilization and minimize waste when your MES is integrated with intra plant logistics (IPL) software. By ensuring just-in-time material replenishment, IPL allows the MES to reach ideal materials allocation and control. The systems together are capable of eliminating wait time for materials, at the same time keeping workstations from receiving too much material all at once.
  3. Fully integrated sampling and testing – Waste caused by manufacturing defects has been the target of CPG lean initiatives for a long time, but integrated manufacturing software can do more than simply detect and prevent defects. It can raise productivity by uncovering and helping to eliminate uneven production workflow caused by disconnected MES and laboratory systems. The native integration of your MES with a full-scale laboratory information management system (LIMS) eliminates bottlenecks that threaten on-time delivery. With the integrated systems, sample taking is automatically embedded in MES workflows, and test results collected by the LIMS are immediately accessible by the MES.

An integrated manufacturing solution also allows CPG manufacturers to achieve higher overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), to integrate their contamination matrix and cleaning strategy to accelerate cleaning operations, and to institute more efficient workstations and workflow to streamline operator movement and batch travel.

Leaning on greater connection and collaboration

Leaner manufacturing is essential to your competitive standing in today’s CPG marketplace. Siemens is ready to support your efforts with OpcenterTM Execution Process, our industry-specific MES for process manufacturing that provides rich, comprehensive MES functionality straight out of the box. Full integration with the rest of the Opcenter MOM portfolio as well as product lifecycle management (PLM) software means that Opcenter Execution Process offers you top floor to shop floor interconnectivity. Along with the comprehensive digital twin, this connectivity provides a gateway to leaner operations, powered by the ingenuity and cross-departmental collaboration of your team members.

We invite you to learn more about Opcenter Execution Process today. And we hope you’ll explore leaner CPG operations with our eBook:

Christian Wendt

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/consumer-products-retail/2025/02/03/leaner-operations-through-integrated-consumer-packaged-goods-manufacturing/