Case Study: British American Tobacco

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British American Tobacco Ltd. - UK

Company Profile

British American Tobacco plc are one of the largest tobacco manufacturers in the world, producing many of the leading international brands. British American Tobacco is the world's most international tobacco group, with an active business presence in more countries than any other.

Situation

As part of a massive expansion programme at their Southampton production facility, BAT have been implementing a fully automated production and warehousing system. BAT required a system that could dynamically allocate cases to customer orders as they passed through the automated warehouse and directly onto customer designated pallets.

This Case Allocation and Labelling’ (CAL) system had the following requirements:

    • It must read a product identification code from each case, allocate it to a customer order, and label the case with customer and automated palletisation information has each case passed by on a conveyor. Cases pass by at a rate of 30 per minute, with overlap between CAL’s reading and labeling elements. 
    • It must provide detailed on-line reporting to operators, management, and HM Customs & Excise. 
    • It must accept customer orders and report totals to BAT’s mainframe scheduling system. 
    • As a mission critical element of the entire production facility, it must provide fault tolerance through the use of a ‘duplex’ system that must withstand failure of a single machine without noticeable interruption to the production throughput, and without loss of any information regarding the shift to date. 

Solution

As a result of experience in similar previous projects, Measuresoft were asked by a third party to develop the entire software suite for the CAL system. This complex suite has since been developed and implemented, and CAL meets, if not exceeds all the requirements placed upon it.

Benefits

As one of BATs most reliable and effective systems, CAL has had a significant impact upon the automation programme at Southampton:

    • CAL is producing significant cost savings over conventional methods of allocation and palletisation. 
    • CAL permits a greater flexibility in fulfilling customer orders than is possible by other means. 
    • CAL is processing the entire output of the production facility. This is currently in excess of ten thousand cases per day. 
    • As a result of the continued operation and reliability of CAL, BAT have permitted themselves to become dependent upon it, with little by way of emergency procedures should CAL fail. 
    • HM Customs & Excise have accepted the accuracy and reliability of production totals reported by CAL, and use this information to derive excise duties on delivered goods.