For every one percent increase in yields, Amalthea expects to save approximately €500,000 euros, which it can reinvest to further develop the business. Amalthea plans to increase its manufacturing capacity in five years to meet the demand for more cheese types and solutions such as its CleardMilk formula, a process by which it can extract whey, cream and other components from raw milk. This helps lessen waste and improve sustainability practices.
Milk composition varies across farms and seasons, presenting a challenge for dairy manufacturers such as Amalthea. Therefore, there is no standard recipe that can be applied across all milk batches to achieve consistent quality and yield. Close monitoring and steering of the cheese production process is required to create cheese consistency so that customers stay loyal and Amalthea maximises yield potential.
Joris Aarts, chief financial officer at Amalthea, said: “Our customers require consistency in the cheese we produce. The big challenge is that milk is the raw material used to produce cheese and, by nature, is very unstable and inconsistent over the seasons. Infor Coleman AI helps us make cheese production as stable and predictable as possible, in terms of quality and yield, so that our customers are happy.”
For each of its cheese batches, Amalthea used to set a target yield based on the practical or past knowledge of production. When a cheese batch deviated from the target yield or the right target yield was not set, factory operators had to take action and make changes to production to make the process more efficient. In the past, production issues were identified by manually processing data and analysing it on a weekly basis. With approximately 240,000 litres of milk processed each day, it was not optimal to wait a week or sometimes a month to get insights and make necessary system changes to optimise yield.
“In the past, we had to do these milk yield calculations manually, and we were only able to do this once per week, or sometimes once per month, so it was too late,” Aarts continued. “On top of that, we were not able to calculate the yields per batch. We could improve milk yield somewhat, but now with Infor Coleman AI, we can not only see the yields per cheese batch in real time, but it also gives us direct insight into what contributors are causing a higher or lower milk yield so the operators can directly act on it.”
In 2020, Amalthea modernised its ERP with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage and leveraged Infor’s cloud technology platform, Infor OS, to solve a milk yield business problem. This was previously hard to tackle because of outdated and disconnected applications, data silos and lack of time and resources. The modernisation formed the building blocks to create AI applications quickly. Amalthea’s AI-driven yield deviation detection and explanation is now fully automated – from data collection and processing to presentation.
Amalthea is utilising Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage throughout its supply chain, from the reception of milk to the cheese warehouse. It interfaces with and helps automate production systems in the factory, such as weighing units and processing tanks. Infor technology also has helped Amalthea improve the speed of its financial closing process from weeks to days. According to Aarts, having the business now fully running in the cloud with Infor provides a strong foundation for future growth, as data insights will play an increasingly important role in dairy production.
“Infor has a process catalogue specifically designed for dairy, and it can give us good insights into milk utilisation and yields,” Aarts continued. “This utilisation of milk is the most important way in which we can manage costs, so Infor already has helped us save money with that.
“Now, with Infor Coleman AI implemented,” he concluded, “we can stretch that even further because we have more real-time data and information about this milk yield.”