Manufacturing & Supply Chain

Treatt, an ingredients manufacturer and solutions provider to the global flavour, fragrance and consumer goods markets, has partnered with Siemens Digital Industries (DI) to build a world class digital manufacturing facility at its £41 million new global headquarters in England. Treatt’s purpose-built site in Bury St Edmunds replaces the existing complex in the town which has served as the company’s headquarters since 1971.

The new facility will bring together, under one roof, over 200 people in its science led distillation, manufacturing, logistics, technical and office-based functions in a once in a generation relocation upgrade to provide the scalable platform for further growth. The factory will be controlled by Siemens SIMATIC PCS 7 system which will offer Treatt more data, flexibility, scalability, availability, safety, and security in its production process.

Crucially it will automate its entire production process, enabling Treatt to increase efficiency and productivity, consistency, reliability, throughput, and repeatability. The new factory is built and designed to have significantly more operational capacity in an optimally designed production space.

Mark Higham, General Manager, Process Automation, Siemens DI, said: “It is important for us to work very closely with Treatt to ensure we deliver the best solutions for their new headquarters.”

Siemens SIMATIC PCS 7 distributed control system is a flexible and scalable platform which addresses the wide-ranging needs of the process industries. It has an open system architecture covering the entire production process ensuring the efficient interaction of all automation components in the factory.

Mark Higham added: “Considering that Treatt is bringing all its functions of distillation, manufacturing and logistics operations under one roof then SIMATIC PCS 7 was a perfect fit.”

Some of the features of SIMATIC PCS 7 are its consistent approach to data management, the application of global standards, powerful and compact hardware and proven software libraries. These common features minimise the engineering overheads, reduce costs, shorten time to market and increase the flexibility of the plant.

Daemmon Reeve, Group CEO of Treatt, said: “As a science led innovator of ingredients designed to enable our customers to differentiate in the marketplace, we are excited to work with Siemens to drive a wide range of benefits into our world class manufacturing business.

“Treatt sources a wide range of natural raw materials from supply partners around the world. As expected, nature provides variation in flavour profile from season to season and our job is to ensure consistency in the wide-ranging extracts we create for customers through complex distillation and extraction processes, so their beverages have the critical consistency in flavour profile.”

Treatt has a bespoke and dedicated analysis system which is now aligned and fully integrated with the Siemens SIMATIC PCS 7 system to capture the results and data for future use as the company drives into further areas of digitalisation for the business.

In addition, Siemens has won a three-year service contract to support the new production facility.

Bruce Sinclair, Engineering & Site Services Manager at Treatt, commented: “The three-year service support contract is necessary as our operations team will be reliant on the new control systems for increased and efficient productivity. It is essential for us that maintenance of the new systems remain at a high standard set by the suppliers of the technology for longevity and competence.”

Siemens has already begun providing support with upskilling Treatt’s employees to use the new systems and their instrumentation engineer has completed a two-week training course at a Siemens site.

“Moving to the new site will be beneficial for our operation and our customers will see very clearly how our science led, customer partnership model is transforming Treatt into a crucial partner for those customers wanting true authenticity in natural extracts to enable them to win, that is what motivates us,” said Daemmon Reeve.

Mark Higham added: “I am delighted that our projects team are partnering with Treatt to deliver this advanced control system which will provide the backbone for their production processes and support their digitalisation journey.

“With digitalisation, we help manufacturers become more agile, and provide tools for reducing operations costs whilst increasing efficiency and reducing time to market.  In addition, our fully integrated safety and security concepts ascertain a safe production environment for employees and the facilities where they are deployed.”

Siemens has teamed up with a fully certified Process Instrumentation Approved Partner for the deployment of the full range of its instrumentation portfolio across all lines of production at the plant.

Jon Tayler, Director at Process Instrument Sales Ltd, commented: “Our strategy for Treatt was to provide a technically correct and commercially effective solution for the instrumentation requirements of the demanding process systems, whilst ensuring efficiencies, safe working practices and environmental criteria.

“Our long-standing relationship with Treatt, as their approved partner, meant that  we are able to be an essential element of the Total Integrated Solution that Siemens promotes for seamless process control and monitoring, which is what the engineering team at Treatt have set out to achieve.”

As well as its UK operation Treatt has a manufacturing site in the USA and a sales office in China, with a network of agents throughout the world.