MES boosts the digitalisation of CEAMSA’s production processes
CEAMSA is a company founded in 1966. Since its origins, it has been a pioneering company specialised in the global production, processing and marketing of a complete range of natural hydrocolloids such as carrageenan, pectin, fibre, alginate and locust bean gum. These ingredients are characterised by their stabilising, gelling, thickening or texturising properties for the food industry as well as other industries (pharmaceutical, cosmetics, etc.).
CEAMSA products meet the highest quality and safety standards and are manufactured while minimising environmental impact. The company’s commitment to innovation—offering sustainable solutions to market needs and trends—is a clear reflection of its values.
Production management systems: one more step in transformation
The production process is critical at CEAMSA to deliver continuous innovation, customised formulations and high-quality service.
It requires full control of production to ensure the final result matches what is defined in the laboratory, as well as a high level of agility to manage highly customised production runs. To achieve this, it is essential to see what is happening in manufacturing in real time, record it, and analyse it to make processes more efficient.
As a company at the forefront of new technologies, CEAMSA’s Porriño plant already has a high degree of automation—mainly thanks to the internal team—so implementing a production management system is another step in its continuous improvement strategy.
Integrated manufacturing processes
In line with this corporate approach, CEAMSA decided to invest in a production environment solution. In this case, an MES solution—based on Siemens technology—as the central axis for data connection and management that integrates all operations. This natural step enables the company to capture and analyse data in real time and manage the execution of manufacturing operations.
The decision to implement this MES system was also linked to the possibility of integrating existing Siemens automation in the plant and the business ERP, providing visibility even beyond what was initially planned.
CEAMSA relied on MAVAL as its technology partner to implement the MES system. As Siemens Smart Expert Partners, specialised in the food and beverage sector, we have close to two decades of experience implementing these kinds of solutions in process industries.
The key to the success of this project is real-time data capture and analysis
The functional benefits achieved after implementing the MES system have been significant on multiple levels.
Production processes have been optimised to increase efficiency, and production runs are better aligned with customer-requested customisation, while ensuring the quality and reliability of the recorded data.
Visibility is the foundation of effective production management. Alongside these functional benefits, implementing the MES and integrating it with the ERP has improved shop-floor visibility and enabled more efficient production management. Having structured operational data available from office workstations has increased responsiveness and accelerated decision-making.
Future plans
CEAMSA plans to continue investing in new technologies as part of its strategic plan. We are currently working on consolidating the MES system across all new production lines.
CEAMSA knows that having optimised processes—and being agile and flexible—is a safe bet to stay at the forefront of its sector and offer customers the best quality and service. They are aware that momentum and investment in digital transformation is the path forward.
We can more accurately tailor production to our customers’ recipes and personalised requests.
Incident investigations are data-driven, allowing us to implement improvement actions with greater confidence and agility.
Downtime management and the alarm system have helped increase availability and performance of our manufacturing lines.