Hessing Supervers, a Dutch family business specialising in ready-to-eat fresh fruit and vegetables, has opened an ultramodern factory in Greenport Venlo dedicated to the transformation of fresh produce. Every day, it transforms more than 320,000 kilos of vegetables into 850 different products, in strict compliance with the highest food safety, sustainability and hygiene standards. 

To meet its needs in terms of performance and responsiveness, Hessing needed a system able to provide full traceability and optimal synchronisation between production and logistics. That is where Actemium Netherlands entered the picture, selected to design and implement a manufacturing execution system (MES) solution based on AVEVA System Platform technology. 

The MES handles coordination of the different factory systems and allows real-time planning, perfectly synchronised with the ERP system.  Thanks to this solution, Hessing is able to deliver its products daily on a just-in-time basis, with reduced lead times and built-in traceability. Operators benefit from enhanced visibility of production lines for ease of monitoring and fast response times. Actemium also integrated redundancy mechanisms to ensure production continuity, which is key in an environment that operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and requires 99.9% uptime. 

In addition, Actemium designed simple, intuitive interfaces, incorporating a system of indicator lights to help identify products and orders, which cuts down on errors and low-added-value tasks. 

Cybersecurity is also prioritised through a service-level agreement with Actemium, which includes round-the-clock support, patch management, and remote monitoring of the entire network and its automated systems with no production stoppages. 

The success of this project is the result of meticulous preparatory work, including the drafting of detailed functional specifications, which facilitated implementation of the MES.