Manufacturing is as much about people as machinery, and when both groups represent different cultures and languages, harmonious production can be a challenge. In the short history of Nong Shim Foods Inc., multi-cultural machines and humans are beginning to mesh.
Nong Shim Foods is the Rancho Cucamonga, CA, division of Nong Shim Co. Ltd., a $1.6 billion food manufacturer based in Seoul, South Korea. The company dominates the Korean food categories in which it competes: it has 31 percent of savory snacks, almost double the share of No. 2 Pepsico Inc., according to Datamonitor. Instant noodles are Nong Shim's main business, and in that segment, it is preeminent, commanding 72 percent of the market.
Instant noodles are a Japanese invention. Much of post-war US aid arrived in the form of wheat, an unfamiliar foodstuff in Asian culture. Nissin Food's Momofuku Ando invented the oil-infusion process that created chicken ramen from wheat flour in 1958 and, with the help of modified starch, instant cup noodles years later. The noodles were shelf stable, easily reconstituted and provided an inexpensive source of nutrition, virtues that made them a hit throughout Asia.
Cash-strapped college students helped create a market for ramen noodles in North America, and waves of Asian émigrés make the US the largest consumer of these products outside Asia. California is home to 4.8 million Asian Americans, including more than a million Koreans, according to Harrison Nam, president of Nong Shim Foods. In 2003, management began the process of transplanting its people and machinery to southern California to bring the freshest possible ramen noodles to North American customers.
The first hurdle in offshore manufacturing was finding a construction partner. McClear (now part of Austin AECOM) built the Barilla pasta plant in Ames, IA, and that led to talks with Nong Shim officials about its 268,000-sq.-ft. project. Design-build is a foreign concept in Korea, and explaining it proved difficult. An even bigger hurdle was translating technical issues between Korean and American engineers.
Easing the challenge was Dai S. Kim, a mechanical engineer with expertise in process engineering. Now director of global engineering services at Austin, Kim was McClier's senior process engineer when ground was broken on the Rancho Cucamonga project in May 2004. "Nong Shim hired a lot of translators, but they could not communicate technical information," he points out. The fluency of Kim and a senior electrical engineer overcame coordination issues that went beyond converting metric to Imperial measurements.
Most of the processing and packaging equipment in the plant was designed by the company's in-house engineering firm, which specified the machinery in Nong Shim's nine Korean and three Chinese plants since 1997. In California, those units had to be integrated with a flour-handling system engineered by Shick USA, shrink-wrap machines from Douglas and X-ray units from Smiths Heimann.
More than 100 control panels attest to the plant's level of automation. Machine PLCs represent a League of Nations of sorts in plant-floor controls. Siemens devices control the noodle line, but peripheral equipment is controlled by Rockwell, Omron, Mitsubishi and other makes. The diversity means extra inventory cost, points out Engineering Manager David Homan, whose team of eight mechanics maintain the processing and packaging areas. He hopes to bring some uniformity to the controls environment, once the groundwork is laid for CMMS and other automation. A more challenging issue during ramp up is logistics: while counterparts in Seoul can provide guidance during the maintenance team's learning period, a 13-hour time difference makes real-time communication difficult.
Nong Shim Engineering designed a commercially available X-ray inspection system, but management opted for Smiths Heimann in California. "They chose us primarily for our checkweighing ability," says Daniel Arsenault, Smiths' West Coast manager. The X-ray units also validate the presence of a foil packet with soup base in many of the products, besides performing the fundamental function of foreign-material screening.
QA Manager Abel Escalante says the computed package weight with the six X-ray machines is within 2 percent-not as precise as the load cells that weigh individual packages upstream, but a good verification step. Package weight monitoring is not simply a product giveaway or underweight issue: it is part of quality control. Excess weight can be an indication of unacceptably high moisture content, which could lead to premature product degradation, Escalante points out. "We do physical inspections, but we also record all the weights, all the time." It is part of a statistical process control program that already is paying dividends in reduced product waste and oil pick-up.
As with the flour system at the head of the line, the X-rays are equipped with modems for remote diagnostics.