AVI Volendam digitalises its shop floor

At the Algemene Verpakkings Industrie, AVI Volendam, packaging has been produced for more than 60 years – for food, but also for magazines and furniture, for example. The base material is plastic, which is processed into bags, sheets and films, printed or unprinted.

Plastic packaging – is that still acceptable? Director Patrick Roskam is enthusiastic about the question. “Sustainability is actually a key focus at AVI Volendam. Packaging plays a role in protecting our customers’ products, and together with our customers we try to reduce plastic use, for example by aiming for thinner packaging. We also look at materials that are easier to recycle, and we pay attention to our own waste stream.”

Roskam explains that plastic packaging is almost always customer-specific. With 1,500 end products, there are both one-off and repeat products. While products are usually not kept in stock, the base materials are so generic that they are stored in silos. Production is carried out by three departments. First there is extrusion, where plastic granulate is processed into film products. These semi-finished products can be printed if needed, and finally there is finishing, where the end products are cut and sealed into bags and carriers or wound onto cores. Together, the three departments have 30 workstations and around 40 employees.

To manage all employees and processes properly, AVI Volendam uses Exact for Manufacturing in combination with the Smart Production Suite of partner Smart Production Solutions. AVI Volendam has a long history with Exact: it worked with Exact for DOS and today uses Exact Online. Some employees can still effortlessly recall the DOS key combinations! Even so, the benefits of the current solution are clear. Roskam: “For 25 years we planned our production in Excel and with plastic trays. Now planning is fully automated.” While Exact for Manufacturing is mainly used by sales, work preparation and accounting, the shop floor is run with Smart Production Solutions. Work orders are presented on tablets, where processing times are also recorded. This is how the company is working towards a paperless shop floor.

Was the transition to a more automated factory painless? According to Roskam, there were some initial problems with the mass balance. Previously, the kilograms of plastic granulate used and the kilograms of finished product reported were tracked on paper. The differences could be explained by various kinds of cutting losses. Getting this right in Exact Online took some head-scratching, but it is now under control again.

Automation is never finished. The next improvement is registering machine breakdowns and quality characteristics such as film thickness and scrap in Exact. The BRC Packaging standard (the global standard for packaging materials) and ISO 9001:2015 are updated regularly. Following version 6 of BRC, for example, ‘production line release’ was implemented in SPS as well. Many products are used in the food industry, so food safety is also a concern for AVI Volendam.