Wilkins Rogers Incorporated has been a leading flour milling and dry mix producer for all
these years. This suburban Baltimore company is one of the largest privately held producers
of flour sold in supermarkets. Its Washington quality foods line is one of the leading suppliers
of custom cake, breading and flavoring mixes sold to large food makers for producing breads,
cakes and cookies, for coating frozen chicken, fish and meats, for making marinades and many
other institutional food items. And it is one of the leading retail brands in the eastern United
States of muffin, waffle, cake and other dry mixes. The company consumes about five million bushels
of wheat here to make its flour and flour based products. That volume is expected to go up as
the company completes installation of a new plant facility at a former brewery building in nearby
Hale Thorpe, Maryland. A significant factor in increasing productivity of the new plant is the
wonderware factory suite of automation software, including the in touch HMI system that gives
operators the human machine interface they need to run the plant and the in batch system that
automates the processing of custom ordered product batches and maintains genealogy records on every
batch produced. The customer brought a very good refreshing and different perspective to the whole
software project in that they actually understood what their problem was going into the project and
had a very good distinct outcome that they wanted to get out of the project. We realized we were
reaching capacity in our current plant we purchased this plant and decided on a retrofit
solution and after shopping the equipment we realized that we needed additional controls to
ensure the accuracy and ensure consistency of our product. Even though the previous occupant of the
Hale Thorpe facility was a brewery none of its production equipment could be used because brewing
beer is a wet mix operation and mixing flour products is a dry mix operation. In 1999 Washington
management began installation of all new equipment including 18 massive silos for storing product
ingredients. Six of the silos contain more than one million pounds of flour and the other store
ingredients such as sugar, salt and dextrose that are used in production of custom products. The
in touch and in batch systems were installed right along with the new mixing and packaging
equipment. The first thing I was looking for was information so I could figure out what kind of
system we needed to put in place. The deeper I looked the better underwear looked and it got to
the point that I was sold I was I was determined that underwear was the way to go. The new Hale
Thorpe plant began initial production in 2000 and has already nearly doubled production to about
40,000 pounds of product per hour. We've seen some significant gains in production speeds and again
that's mostly due to the coordination between departments but the accuracy of our process,
the elimination of waste, the elimination of reworking bed batches has been a significant
improvement and that's all due to the accuracy that we're receiving off of the underwear system
and off of the equipment that we installed. Each week's production schedule details what
orders will be made that week based on customer orders and seasonal variations. Typical batches
are about 5,000 pounds in size. Two in batch campaigns are prepared for each order. The first
specifies the formulation for the order including hand additions of sugars, dextrose and flavorings.
The second campaign specifies the equipment to be used and the mixing recipes for preparing
each custom batch. The premixed formulation additions are stored in tubs each labeled with
precise content ID for the particular batch in which it will be used. The flour is transferred
via air conveyor pipes into the mixing tank and the tub additions are poured in manually. Once the
automatic mix cycle is completed the batch is conveyed into a tote bin for transfer to the
appropriate packaging line. Quality control tests are run on every batch to check and verify its
ingredient contents as well as levels of proteins, pH, leavening agents and other elements. The
product totes are elevated to the plant mesmer where they can be gravity-fed to the packaging
lines below. In addition to its own retail packaging Washington quality foods bulk packages
products in bags ranging from 2 to 50 pounds in size. Everything is tracked from incoming
ingredients to outgoing products. All of our recipes now are in in batch and if there's a
change made to that recipe is global over the whole system. The way we did it before that
wasn't necessarily true because we were dealing with paper and it might have been changed in
one place but not distributed to everybody that needed to know about the change. I have a confidence
in the software that it's it gives an indication of exactly what's happened so that there's a
question when we have a problem with a batch we can go into the historical database and it's a good
diagnostic tool to try to backtrack and determine what that problem was. An important benefit of
using the in-batch system is its ability to validate each and every step that was taken in
production of a batch. That's especially critical for Washington quality foods because 100% of
its products are kosher. All tanks and pipelines are stainless steel which aids in equipment
cleaning. Four different scale systems are used for different types of ingredients to minimize
contamination in blending operations. The hailthorpe plant has been designed to be in constant motion
while one set of products is being mixed. Another set is being formulated for the next batch.
Operators can quickly move from one batch to the next which enhances productivity as well as
consistency in product manufacture. One to where as a system certainly has played a big part in the
improvements that we've seen in our manufacturing capabilities. I tell you one side benefit that
we've seen is we've impressed our customers more than we ever thought we would. Those customers
that know food plants that have been through here on tours yes they like what we've done with the
infrastructure they like what we've done with the equipment but it's been the one to where system
that has brought that all together that has really impressed them that we are controlling the process.
Washington quality foods is controlling the manufacturing process to such a high degree that
it instills confidence in our customers that we are able to do a consistent and reliable job.
The ultimate goal is to increase the company's production of full 300% from what it was at
the old plant. A goal that is well on its way to being achieved thanks to the combination of factory
suite and the forward thinking management at Washington quality foods. A company whose flour
and cake mix business is definitely on the rise.
