Bernard Kroger began the Kroger Company in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1883. It is the country's largest supermarket chain in terms of revenue ($109.83 billion in fiscal year 2015), the second-largest general retailer (behind Walmart), and the twenty-third-largest corporation. Kroger is also the world's fifth largest retailer. Kroger runs 2,778 supermarkets and multi-department shops, either directly or through subsidiaries. The headquarters of Kroger are located in downtown Cincinnati. It operates marketplaces in 34 states, with supermarkets, superstores, department shops, 786 convenience stores, and 326 jewelry stores among its store formats. Kroger supermarket stores can be found all over the Midwest and Southern United States. Kroger has 37 food processing or manufacturing plants, 1,360 supermarket fuel outlets, and 2,122 pharmacies under its umbrella.

Kroger decided to invest in the V5 Formula System to ensure optimal batch quality and consistency. Kroger sought to automate shop floor weighing operations without sacrificing flexibility in the weighing room and dispensary areas, and move their manual batching process with paper-based lot verification to the next level.

Operator errors in the weighing process and inaccuracies in lot control are typically not represented in the paper trail, which can lead to issues with accounting, inventory, and purchasing, as well as product quality from batch to batch. Inaccurate batch weighing results in inconsistent freshly baked items, which is unsatisfactory to both the brand and the consumer. Kroger demanded that all formulae be 100 percent correct each and every time. They turned to SG Systems for the tried-and-true V5 solution.

The data from a production order is exported into the V5 Control Center after it has been created in the company's ERP system (SAP).

At the operator workstations situated throughout the facility, the Job (number of batches, needed batch size, and production sites) and the BOM (recipe stages, weighing sequence, and target weights) are provided. Multiple V5 Formula Systems, Label Printers, and a range of Mettler Toledo Weighing Scales of various sizes and capacities make up the workstations.

The V5 Formula System displays the area-specific Production Plan on easy-to-understand panels. This eliminates the need for paper timetables and prevents operators from formulating incorrectly or out of order. Following the selection of the needed formula, the operator is guided via easy displays that ask for the lot number of each color pigment. The weighted items are portioned precisely and within the stringent tolerances defined by management, thanks to a speedometer display. Because the system will not tolerate out-of-tolerance weighing, the operator cannot weigh too much or too little. This has a significant impact on batch uniformity and overall product quality, which is critical to Kroger's business model.

At the main PC, electronic reports specifying which operator has weighed the various steps, as well as the lot number and scaled amount, are provided. This visibility is provided by the Recipe Batch Report (COA), which details the exact amounts of each of the ingredients weighed into the batch (or handled through complete batches). This process has been automated by the SG Systems Software to enable fast and precise batch sign-off of formulas.

Because the jobs can have dozens of batches, slight modifications in the formula are made to account for differences in the strength of the ingredients across lots. The modifications are made in the ERP system, which is subsequently exported to the SG Systems database. This allows for real-time'mid-flight' editing of current jobs.

The V5 Batch Weighing Solution creates inventory consumption data in real time (after each batch is completed) to offer paperless lot traceability, which is then utilized to deduct inventory. This enhances inventory visibility, saves time double-handling data, and decreases man hours spent on data entry. Furthermore, rather than providing theoretical usage based on goal weights, the V5 System gives real usage based on scaling weights. This enables accurate yield calculations, as well as visibility into supplier inventory accuracy. For more info check feed.kroger.com.

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