Colloquia

Summary

One of the most difficult things to manage in a large company is data. Proper management can better a company’s competitive position in the market by turning data into actionable information. Simultaneously, a poor management of data can lead to costly mistakes and time loss due to communication problems or false information. Within FrieslandCampina’s packaging development department, many workhours are spent requesting data from various sources within the company and suppliers.

This created a wish for a packaging performance model; a model which captures information on the packaging related manufacturing lines and monitors its costs and quality. An exploratory case study was performed to test whether such a tool was viable to be created. This resulted in a prototype, the Argus tool, which gives insights on production costs and quality related statistics on FrieslandCampina’s beverage carton filling lines. This Power BI dashboard connected various data sources from within the company and suppliers.

During a ten month internship, research was conducted on what data is currently available, how this data can be obtained, and whether it can be used in combination with other data sources for new insights. Codesign session were held with the packaging developers to capture their wishes and use cases for the data model. Near the end of the project, a digital prototype was created in Microsoft Power BI and tested on the same target group.

The creation of the Argus tool led to practical insights for potential continuation of the project. It showed that the creation of a performance monitoring tool is possible, but the separate datasets are too inconsistent for immediate development. The creation of a minimum viable product showed the current flaws in the company’s system architecture which would have be to solved before committing to further development of this monitoring tool.