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Manufacturing Swedish snuff, or snus, is a precision business subject to demanding quality standards. Regular snuff users can immediately discern variations in flavor, moistness or even pH values. Moreover, Swedish Match—the world’s leading snuff manufacturer—is pursuing highly ambitious environmental efforts. Its energy and water consumption must be efficient, and its impact on the surroundings minimal. As a result, the corporation has continuously enhanced measurement and monitoring in its QA and environmental activities. A year ago, Swedish Match also implemented a Web interface enabling users anywhere—in corporate HQ or on the factory floor—to create tailored analyses.
Swedish Match is a global leader in niche tobacco products such as snuff, pipe tobacco, cigars and chewing tobacco, and generated revenues of almost SEK 14 bn in 2002. Snuff for the northern European market is manufactured at a facility outside Gothenburg, which implemented a Web-based QA and environmental monitoring system, with assistance from SAS Institute.
High data volumes
Bertil Runström, Swedish Match’s Corporate QA and Environmental Manager says: “We’ve been using the SAS system to monitor our QA and environmental efforts for several years now—the data volumes collated and analyzed are extensive.”
Random samples are taken at several production phases on a daily basis, right from snuff preparation to sticking labels onto snuff-packs, and the samples are analyzed in a lab. Selected production data is also collated continuously through the preparation process, with quantities like temperatures and ingredient volumes logged. Additionally, data from returns is stored in a database that is integrated with the analysis interface.
“Users want a whole spectrum of data,” continues Bertil, “our QA engineers want to spot any discrepancies in humidity or pH in production, and returns due to flaws in flavor, consistency or other factors. On the environmental side, we’re more interested in energy consumption, CO2 emissions and recovery ratios.”
The Web access pay-off
In the past, Swedish Match uploaded fixed-format reports of this data to its intranet and put them on various notice boards in production facilities, but for the last year or so, the information has been available on the Web. Now, virtually all staff can access return statistics and QA data, producing their own analysis on a simple browser. Production statistics are also accessible on the Web, although access is more limited.
“Now, all types of user—be they corporate or business area managers, process technicians or QA, environment and production engineers—can access data better, creating graphs and tables with analyses in various dimensions,” adds Bertil, illustrating with a few practiced mouse-clicks, “for example, they can view the number of returns relating to portion sachet seals on a selected production line, or error types by registration or packing date.”
“This means we can shorten lead-times between detection and decision on remedial action. By easily accessing information that’s just one day old, we have altogether new possibilities to flag up anything that starts to go wrong. Obviously, the faster we take action on a problem, the more money we save. Simply put, we get our priorities right immediately, and additionally, with the SAS system, we know we’re using statistically relevant and quality-assured data, a prerequisite for acting quickly and resolutely.”
