2008-10-24 - Tetley GB Limited, a fully owned subsidiary of Tata Tea Limited, is the world’s second largest manufacturer and distributor of tea.
Owned by India’s Tata Group, Tetley’s manufacturing and distribution business is spread across 40 countries and sells over 60 branded tea bags. It is the largest tea company in the UK and Canada and the second largest in the US by volume. Tetley’s UK tea production facility in Eaglescliffe, County Durham is the sole producer of Tetley Tea Bags.
The plant had been experiencing problems with its production line, with some ABB robots occasionally tripping out on alarms and causing delays to the whole production cycle.
Plant maintenance manager, Colin Trevor comments: “We had been experiencing a number of breakdowns during production with spurious alarms, causing the robots to periodically stop. This obviously caused some concerns with our engineers, who were not sure what the fault was. Consequently, we spent a lot of time re-setting the robots, hoping the next breakdown wouldn’t occur.”
Colin continues, “the downtime we’d incurred through trying to trace and rectify the fault meant that several hours of production time were lost. It was for this reason that we were keen to try out ABB’s remote service agreement.”
Introducing Remote Service
To prevent future disruption to production caused by unplanned downtime, Tetley signed up to an ABB Response service agreement, which included installing a service box and system infrastructure into the robot control systems. Using the Remote Service solution, ABB can remotely monitor and collect data on the "wear & tear" and productivity of robotic cells; which can then be shared with the customer. This helps to prevent production stoppage.
Benefits – Higher production uptime
Since signing up to the agreement, Tetley GB Limited has enjoyed greatly reduced robot downtime, with no more disruption caused by unforeseen problems.
“The remote service package has dramatically changed the plant,” explains Colin. “We no longer have breakdown issues throughout the shift, helping us to achieve much longer periods of robot uptime.
As we have learned, world-class manufacturing facilities need world-class support packages. Remote monitoring of our robots helps us to maintain machine uptime, prevent costly downtime and ensures my employees can be put to more valuable use. I would have no hesitation in recommending ABB and its service contracts to other people and when we put other robots in, they will more likely be ABB’s, complete with full service contracts.”
A word from ABB
Chris Withey, Services Manager for ABB’s UK robotics business, underlines the value that a remote service agreement can bring: “In today’s competitive environment, business profitability often relies on demanding production schedules that do not always leave time for exhaustive or repeated equipment health checks. Our remote service agreements are designed to monitor our customers’ robots to identify when problems are likely to occur and ensure that help is dispatched before the problem can escalate. In over 50 per cent of the cases we deal with, our robots can be brought back online remotely, without any further intervention.”
ABB service agreements – the key to greater productivity
ABB offers a flexible choice of service agreements for its robots, which can help extend the mean time between failures, shorten the time to repair and lower the cost of automated production. With three new packages available; Response, Maintenance and Warranty, each backed up by ABB’s remote service technology; businesses can minimise the impact of unplanned downtime and achieve improved production line efficiency.