Technology is now central to the farmer-owned food co-operative's operation. Photo / Supplied
Technology is now central to the farmer-owned food co-operative's operation. Photo / Supplied
Last year Alliance Group installed robot cutters at the co-operative's 60-year-old Southland processing plant at Lorneville. The $12.5 million upgrade included new generation primal cutters, middles and fores technology together with an X-ray unit it uses to analyse each carcase, then optimise the cutting process.
The investment is the most recent step in what Alliance Group general manager manufacturing Willie Wiese says is now a seven-year manufacturing excellence programme.
Earlier versions of similar automation technology were already in place at the co-operative's Dannevirke, Pukeuri and Smithfield plants, but Wiese says Lorneville is now one of the two most advanced meat processing plants in the Southern Hemisphere.
"We've invested in technology over the past seven years and over that time we have focused on high-tech automation," says Wiese. "We're continuously looking for opportunities to automate and improve the quality of products that we supply to customers."
Technology is now central to the farmer-owned food co-operative's operation. In addition to robot automation, Alliance has invested in artificial intelligence, more traditional information technology and decarbonisation.
Wiese says technology helps Alliance Group to deal with the continuing labour shortages and gain efficiencies.
"It's in line with our manufacturing excellence programme and, importantly, it prevents injuries. Before automation, we would manually load each carton into a container.
A container takes 720 cartons and we had a lot of musculoskeletal injuries."
Automation means that a carcass can enter the plant and move through the processing line without being touched by a human hand right up to the point of shoulder cuts.
It's not just the cutting line — Alliance Group spent a further $16m on a fully integrated storage and warehouse system at Lorneville which is now being installed. When that goes live a year from now, it means the products will automatically move through the warehouse and be palletised again without being touched by human hands.
Running highly automated plants takes more sophistication than traditional meat works.
To train workers, Alliance Group has partnered with the original equipment manufacturers to set up a detailed training scheme to raise the skill levels of the company's engineering staff who maintain and support the automation equipment. Likewise, operations staff are trained to use the equipment. Employees are sent on continuous refresher training programmes to top up their skills.
Willie Wiese. Photo / Supplied
Meat cutting and packing automation at this level are relatively new. There are tasks that it can't handle well at this stage, it is not yet good at handling cuts where the bone is taken out of the product. Wiese says the technology to do that doesn't exist yet.
"Automation is still unavailable in some areas where we need technology to deal with the challenges that we face. As the technologies become available, we adopt them as early as we can. We are currently working on three pilot projects for further automation with one of the equipment manufacturers."
While automation helps Alliance Group deal with labour shortages, there is still a lot of manual work. Using robots increases the throughput. It means more carcasses move through the plant and into the boning rooms, yet when they arrive, more physical labour is needed to do the final cuts and maintain the high throughput rate.
Wiese says automation has other benefits besides improving safety and efficiency: it also gives Alliance Group greater capacity and flexibility. "In 2018 we opened a new bovine plant next to the Lorneville facility. Then, two years ago, we converted that plant to be a hybrid plant so that it can now run both bovine and cervine (venison). This means that now, we can turn the capacity on depending on livestock flows rather than trying to get suitable livestock to come into the plant. We now have the technology that means we can put cattle and venison through the plant on the same day." says Wiese.
The flexibility allowed Alliance Group to start using new run modes which unlocked significant beef capacity. "We are now in the position where we can effectively process all our farmer shareholders' cattle," says Wiese. "Many of our farmer shareholders will bring in their sheep and lamb, but they also farm cattle. We didn't always have the necessary beef capacity to deal with these volumes, but technology changes that. It enables us to make different run mode decisions which open latent capacity that existed, but until 18 months ago could not always be used."
In 2019, Alliance Group announced plans to phase out coal use at its plants within a decade. Wiese says it's part of a clear environmental strategy with a series of pillars; decarbonisation is one goal, and another is to reduce water use, a challenge when meat processing plants use a lot of water for cleaning, hygiene and other purposes. Improving the quality of discharged water and reducing the amount of waste that is sent to landfill are other pillars.
Alliance is installing an electrode boiler to reduce the use of coal-fired boilers at its Lorneville plant. Photo / Supplied
"There's a deliberate plan. We've done a gap analysis on each pillar. We know plant by plant what the opportunity is and, capital depending, we are running each of them down as fast as we can. Carbon is where we have made the biggest inroads. We've identified a potential carbon reduction of between 77 and 85 per cent and we expect to get there by 2029." Alliance Group is working with EECA, the government's Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority, and participating in several programmes to get grants or lower-cost green financing to fund the change.
As part of this, Alliance is installing an electrode boiler to reduce the use of coal-fired boilers at Lorneville. A second project will replace the main coal-fired boiler at Mataura with a high-temperature heat pump system and a small diesel boiler for dealing with peak demand. The third project will see waste heat from the refrigeration plant at Smithfield captured and used to replace coal burning for process heat.
Wiese says in the past that heat would have dissipated into the atmosphere, but now it can reduce the co-operative's energy requirements.
• The Alliance Group is an advertising sponsor of the Herald's Agribusiness & Trade report.
