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.
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. The new factory is built and designed to have significantly more operational capacity in an optimally designed production space.
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 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, 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.
Siemens has teamed up with a 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.