A Glass for Every Moment: How Crisal Modernized Production with TrakSYS

For over 80 years, Crisal has shaped the glassware industry in Marinha Grande, being the only factory in Portugal to produce on a large scale using automatic processes. Crisal is especially strong in developing, producing, and supplying customised products for the drinks industry and in retail and foodservice market channels. Some of its most emblematic pieces have become symbols of Portuguese culture in Portugal and worldwide.

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Since 2022, Crisal has been part of the Leerdam Crisal Group, together with its sister company located in Leerdam, the Netherlands. The company's success is driven by continuous investment in new technologies, design, and quality, with a strong focus on environmental and social concerns.

When Crisal's legacy shop floor system approached end-of-life, the team realized they needed to modernize their Manufacturing Execution System (MES), without losing a beat. To achieve this, they turned to Actemium, a Parsec Registered Partner, to help them find a solution that would preserve critical functionality, enhance digitalization, and provide real-time insights for operators and supervisors alike.

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• Concurrent ERP migration and MES deployment required tight, reliable integrations.
• Legacy, paper/Excel-based tracking for setup plans and visual inspections slowed analysis and traceability.
• Operators needed fast, intuitive, multilingual screens to encourage adoption.
• Legacy reports had to be replicated and improved without disrupting production.

Working alongside Actemium, the team at Crisal worked to implement a TrakSYS solution that would:

• Support Connected Worker initiatives by equipping operators, supervisors, planning, and maintenance teams with role-based, intuitive screens to start/stop POs, record notes, view shift targets vs. actuals, and manage in-shift tasks.
• Streamline OT Governance by centralizing master data (products, lines, setups, rejection reasons), and support version and control plans via audit trails of in-run adjustments tied to orders/lots, enforcing permissions and standardizing workflows to reduce process variability and ensure traceability.
• Provide downtime tracking and analysis, enabling teams to detect stops automatically from PLC signals, capture reason codes, and visualize losses.
• Deliver real-time and historical KPIs to enable fact-based decision making.

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To help Crisal achieve its goals and future-proof its investment, Actemium recommended TrakSYS. Working closely with Crisal, they architected a TrakSYS deployment that would unify ERP information and production inputs and gather data from equipment, with the goal of delivering fast, real-time information.

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Actemium held targeted sessions with Production, Planning, and Maintenance departments to define data structures, workflows, and reports. As a result, Crisal's TrakSYS deployment was configured to:

• Interface with ERP to import production orders and post confirmations where required.
• Connect to PLCs to collect yield, rejections, speed, and automatically detect stops.
• Digitalize setup plans allocated to each batch order, so each product/line had defined targets and limits, with in-run changes recorded and tied to PO history.
• Simplify visual rejection entry and auto-generate a Top-N rejection list by order/shift/line for fact-based problem solving.
• Provide custom dashboards and reports for real-time and historical insight.

Utilizing TrakSYS, Crisal was able to:

• Preserve and enhance legacy functionality while migrating to the new ERP.
• Trace setup configurations by batch order and link parameters to outputs.
• Track KPIs of different process areas.
• Standardize visual rejection capture and auto-surface top causes.
• Gain real-time visibility into production quantity, speed, and line status.
• Improve shift handover and shorten monthly reporting cycles.