Importaco
From paper records to real-time operational decisions that optimize production with MESView
Importaco is an international food company specializing in the production of nuts and mineral water, and a national leader in both markets. It operates 17 manufacturing plants featuring advanced sorting, processing, packaging, and bottling operations, supported by exhaustive end-to-end quality control.
Having reliable, consistent data across plants is the foundation for managing operations, prioritizing improvement initiatives, and making decisions that deliver a real impact on productivity and waste reduction.
With that goal in mind, Importaco embarked on a clear path toward a more connected factory—reducing reliance on paper and manual processes, and seeking a platform to turn shop-floor data into a real-time management tool.
Before implementing MESView, the primary challenge was a lack of visibility. into what was happening on the shop floor at any given moment. Data was gathered manually manually, scattered, and often late or incomplete, making it difficult to effectively control performance and make timely operational decisions.
This situation particularly impacted critical KPIs:
- OEE, which was calculated after the fact and with low reliability.
- Line downtime, lacking consistent tracking of root causes, duration, and recurrence.
- Waste and scrap, with a significant impact during changeovers and startups.
- Quality control, reliant on manual records.
- Energy consumption, lacking a direct correlation with production to help interpret efficiencies or deviations.
Furthermore, Importaco already had prior experience with another MES system implemented in two of the group’s plants.
Although they had chosen a solution considered a ‘market leader,’ the outcome was a slow and expensive deployment due to high customization requirements, drawn-out project timelines, and high total costs (implementation and licensing).
The lesson was clear: to scale digitalization across new plants, they needed a different approach—one that was more agile and less dependent on endless custom development.
Importaco chose MESView in search of a functionally comprehensive and robust platform that was, above all, fast to deploy—without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’ through extensive customizations.
The implementation was designed as an orderly, phased rollout, kicking off with a pilot line. and was gradually expanded to the remaining lines. This approach allowed the team to quickly validate the system’s value, fine-tune KPIs with the staff, and ensure a solid rollout.
A particularly key milestone was the integration with SAP. Importaco highlighted the speed with which Exos developed the integration APIs, adapting to the existing interface and achieving stable operation from day one, with no notable issues.
Following the implementation, Importaco successfully turned shop-floor data into an operational tool, providing objective, accessible information in real time.. Today, they routinely track:
- OEE by line and shift
- Availability and downtime causes
- Actual vs. planned production
- Waste and rejects
- Key quality indicators
In terms of impact, Importaco highlights clear improvements:
- Greater data transparency and objectivity: A 'common language' across the organization, leading to less debate over what happened and a sharper focus on why it happened.
- Stronger alignment between production, maintenance, and quality: Driven by a single source of truth that makes it easy to clearly identify root causes, durations, and recurrences
- Faster, data-driven decision-making: Moving from post-mortem analysis to real-time action as deviations occur, directly impacting performance, waste reduction, and operational stability
“MESView met virtually 100% of our process requirements right out of the box.”
Alejandro Alhambra García
Chief Information Officer
With these results, Importaco reinforced its commitment to MESView as a lever for standardization and continuous improvement, with the goal of accelerating its rollout to more group plants and moving toward a more standardized, manageable operating model.
