projects - Food & Bev­er­age

Our client is an in­ter­na­tion­al FMCG play­er in the food & bev­er­age seg­ment. They work from a large pro­duc­tion lo­ca­tion in the Nether­lands. Pro­duc­tion runs con­tin­u­ous­ly, 24 hours a day.

An in­ter­na­tion­al audit, in which the var­i­ous pro­duc­tion lo­ca­tions were bench­marked against each other, showed that this pro­duc­tion lo­ca­tion scored rel­a­tive­ly less on the theme of ther­mal en­er­gy con­sump­tion. The ther­mal en­er­gy was and is gen­er­at­ed on site by means of gas-fired steam boil­ers. The large loss of en­er­gy turned out to be the re­sult of one of the two high-pres­sure steam pipes that turned out to be in­cor­rect­ly di­men­sioned. The line no longer matched cur­rent con­sump­tion and was too large. This re­sult­ed in con­den­sa­tion and thus led to sig­nif­i­cant en­er­gy loss.

DAPP was asked to pro­vide a project man­ag­er who could solve this prob­lem. The order that was given con­cerned a com­plete de­sign of a new high-pres­sure steam pipe­line. Ad­di­tion­al pro­vi­sions were in­clud­ed in the de­sign to en­able this pipe­line and the as­so­ci­at­ed pro­duc­tion in­stal­la­tions to be taken out of op­er­a­tion in a safe man­ner if nec­es­sary. In the old sit­u­a­tion this was im­pos­si­ble: dur­ing an in­spec­tion or dur­ing main­te­nance, the en­tire pro­duc­tion lo­ca­tion had to be taken out of op­er­a­tion im­me­di­ate­ly. A rather dras­tic and ex­pen­sive course of ac­tion.

Our DAPP project man­ag­er was al­lowed to put to­geth­er his own team. It was im­por­tant to him in that choice that a po­ten­tial team mem­ber had a high de­gree of demon­stra­ble sub­ject mat­ter ex­per­tise and ex­pe­ri­ence with the sub­ject. This was im­por­tant be­cause the as­sign­ment turned out to be com­plex and the re­sult­ing risks for the pro­duc­tion in­stal­la­tion were very high. A con­trolled and man­aged tran­si­tion was a top pri­or­i­ty. Any error in the en­gi­neer­ing and dur­ing re­al­iza­tion could lead to a long-term down­time of the en­tire pro­duc­tion lo­ca­tion.

In ad­di­tion to ex­pe­ri­enced em­ploy­ees from pro­duc­tion, en­gi­neer­ing and main­te­nance, our project man­ag­er in­volved var­i­ous spe­cial­ized ex­ter­nal con­trac­tors and sup­pli­ers in the project, such as from the in­spec­tion body, the 'no­ti­fied body'.

The DAPP project man­ag­er worked to­geth­er with his team, which at times con­sist­ed of as many as 25 mem­bers. What he thought was im­por­tant and want­ed to achieve with the project was the im­prove­ment of the old ex­ist­ing sit­u­a­tion on sev­er­al lev­els:

• func­tion­al (im­proved con­trols, im­proved mea­sure­ments);
• safe­ty (ap­ply­ing strength cal­cu­la­tions in the de­sign, being able to go into and out of op­er­a­tion in a con­trolled man­ner);
• tech­ni­cal (ap­ply­ing in­no­va­tive tech­niques, in­clud­ing in the field of in­su­la­tion);
• costs (by, among other things, choos­ing the op­ti­mal pipe­line route).

In order to achieve these ob­jec­tives, the nec­es­sary ob­sta­cles had to be re­moved, some­times lit­er­al­ly. A good ex­am­ple of this is the tran­sit that had to be made through an al­most 1 meter thick foun­da­tion floor.

Spe­cial­ists with  a lot of ex­pe­ri­ence learned a lot through the ap­pli­ca­tion of in­no­va­tive tech­niques, also un­known to them. This re­quired good team­work in which a good con­struc­tive at­mos­phere was im­por­tant. Ev­ery­one took the ut­most care to achieve the project suc­cess. There was an at­mos­phere in the project team, when the cir­cum­stances de­mand­ed it, not to be afraid to de­vi­ate from the beat­en track in order to ar­rive at the op­ti­mal so­lu­tion.

Dur­ing the re­al­iza­tion phase, pro­duc­tion was stopped twice in order to in­stall the new high-pres­sure steam pipe­line under the nec­es­sary time pres­sure. We man­aged to keep to the sched­ule and the new pipe­line has now been suc­cess­ful­ly put into op­er­a­tion. This not only makes an im­por­tant con­tri­bu­tion to en­er­gy sav­ings, but also makes it pos­si­ble to start and shut down pro­duc­tion in­stal­la­tions in a safe and easy way. The new steam pipe­line leads to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2% sav­ings, ex­pressed in MJ/unit of prod­uct, on the total ther­mal en­er­gy con­sump­tion of the pro­duc­tion site. This doesn't seem like much, but in ab­so­lute terms it leads to sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings that pay for the in­vest­ment in 3 years. All in all, a mean­ing­ful, prof­itable and above all sus­tain­able in­vest­ment.

The ad­just­ments were also a great op­por­tu­ni­ty to carry out re­me­di­a­tion work on the in­stal­la­tion. These are often the final item in the bud­get and are often for­got­ten.

This com­plet­ed the suc­cess­ful de­liv­ery and con­trib­utes sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the full sat­is­fac­tion of the client and users.