Atria is one of the leading meat and food companies in Northern Europe. The company was established in 1903 and has today more than 3.700 employees in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia.

Back in 2015 Atria decided to build a new factory in Nurmo in Finland. In 2017 the secondary processing area was upgraded to one of the most advanced cut floors in the world when it comes to automized planning, traceability, quality and yield registration and data-driven decisions. Atria has since been able to constantly add new functionality to meet new customer demands and to optimize yield in all processes on the new platform.

In 2021 it was time to upgrade the 20+ year old primary processing area and chill rooms from a previous provider’s solution with the latest and most innovative control systems from Frontmatec. This included simultaneously changing the MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and the PLC layer - while the system was in operation – processing approx. 3.200 high quality pigs each day.

The preparation started back in the beginning of 2021, where Atria hired Frontmatec to start analyzing the system, and Frontmatec handed in a pre-project report. After analyzing the outcome of the pre-project and doing several workshops with a strong focus on identifying risks and risk mitigation, Frontmatec started the engineering. This was followed up by an extensive test period where both teams tested and trained all scenarios in a simulated environment and on-site in very close collaboration.

In January 2022 the commissioning started. After detecting some potential issues shortly before the planned go-live, the go live was postponed by Frontmatec for a few days. A strong risk-mitigation factor in the deployment strategy allowed for a full roll-back with minimum impact on systems and production to allow continued production with existing systems. Finally, the go live happened and it went very well. The teams followed a very fast ramp up plan and in less than three days the production was back up at full capacity.

Both the teams but also the management at Atria was very satisfied and impressed by the work. Atria did not lose a single pig, and the management provided some very good feedback, i.e., Tauno Perälä (VP of Production):

“Very well executed, very good decision making and co-operation and were able to start running full production already on 3^rd day”.

Also Jukka Mäntykivi, the Group CIO, was very impressed with the cooperation:

“Successful, impressed that we are only on the 3^rd day and already production is normal. We made a good choice in selecting Frontmatec, very good working relationship on our teams, really good experience and very important, nobody cares which side of the team you are on”.

Read more about Atria here: Link

Read more about Frontmatec MES here: Link