Linkosuo’s self-monitoring takes place in real time remotely
Linkosuo is a company founded in 1936 with roots in the confectionery world. Today, Linkosuo is divided into two different companies, one covering the café operations and the other the bakery operations in a food processing plant. The production of the Linkosuo plant focuses especially on dry bread products and rye and oat-based snacks. The Linkosuo Bakery invests heavily in the quality of products and production. Responsible choices and high quality play a major role in all of the company’s operations and are reflected in day-to-day work in many different ways.
The Linkosuo Bakery has been investing in product and production quality for decades. With the help of Nokeval’s measurement system, the self-monitoring of Linkosuo’s production is also performed remotely in real time.
Linkosuo’s extensive production contains a large number of self-monitoring tasks, from which summary reports are generated periodically. The desire for more effective quality control and optimisation sparked the idea of digitising postings and reporting, which allows for a response immediately after a problem is detected. In the digitisation of Linkosuo’s quality measuring it was especially important to integrate all remotely monitored points into the system, so that deviations occurring in them would cause automatic alarms. Various counters were also connected to the system, e.g. when connected to metal detectors. Real-time data transfer offers new possibilities not only for monitoring the process but also for its development, when the conditions when the report arrives are still the same as in the reporting situation.
Linkosuo’s quality control Tytti Tukiainen says that she is surprised at how easily the information is now available and accessible whenever needed.
“Automatic remote monitoring alarms have had a clear positive effect on production monitoring, as the data logged into the system can always be traced and the problem situation can be accurately located.”
In addition to the numerical values, the monitoring is also available in a graphical format, which further facilitates the interpretation of the measurement results. The system is logical in its usability, and all products and data are at hand with a few keystrokes right away without waiting for summary reports. Real-time has been a significant advantage in the work of a quality control and has clearly helped make operations more efficient. According to Tytti, the positive feedback from the production staff on the system has been particularly nice, and based on that, Linkosuo intends to expand the system to be even more comprehensive.
Linkosuo had also tested competing products, but the comprehensiveness of digitalisation and good value for money decided the choice between Nokeval’s system and other service providers. Linkosuo uses the system in many ways, it includes
- temperature sample measurements
- surface hygiene measurements
- the recording of numerous other data and observations.
The system deserves special praise for its adaptability, which has been very useful in the design of a large entity. A special feature of the Linkosuo system is a counter connected to a metal detector, which records the results in both numbers and graphs in the system to ensure good readability. The solution has been implemented as a unique customer-designed function for the Ovaport system. Linkosuo’s quality control names the flexibility and the design of the customer-specific add-ons as the major producers of the system’s high added value – a similar service is unavailable for many competing systems.