industrial manufacturing - SURRETTE BATTERY DTO USE CASE

Surrette Battery Company Limited is a Canadian industrial manufacturer specializing in deep-cycle batteries for renewable energy storage, rail, and material handling applications. Operating a complex production environment with multiple work centres and both automated and semi-automated processes, Surrette sought to improve operational visibility and decision-making at its main production facility. Like many industrial manufacturers, Surrette faced challenges with:

• limited visibility into detailed work centre activities and process flows
• inconsistent labour standards and unclear resource utilization
• data quality issues across ERP and manual data collection processes
• difficulty quantifying the impact of process improvements before implementation

These constraints created a need for a more integrated, data-driven planning capability. 

Key Problem Statement

Surrette lacked a unified model to:

• accurately represent production resource requirements (labour, equipment, facility)
• quantify resource utilization and identify inefficiencies as optimization targets
• evaluate process improvement opportunities with confidence

CBP-DTO Solution Approach

Surrette implemented a Digital Twin of the Organization (DTO) using Collaborative Business Planning (CBP), supported by the QualiWare platform, in a phased modeling approach: 

• Phase 1: Front-end processes (lead oxide production, grid casting, plate pasting)
• Phase 2: Large industrial battery production (enveloping, casting, charging, assembly)
• Phase 3: Smaller monoblock battery production (Dynamac, waterbath) and plant-wide material handling, shipping and receiving

Data Integration included ERP (Syspro), Excel-based resource plans, and shop-floor interview, logs and observations.

Key Capabilities Enabled by CBP

Built across three phases over ~9 months and co-funded by NGen, the Surrette DTO modeled a complex industrial manufacturing environment from raw materials to finished product. Capabilities included: 

• End-to-End Operational Visibility
  Single integrated model of production, support activities, and operational flows 
• Granular Labour and Resource Modeling

         Detailed analysis of hands-on processing times for over 200 unique process activities

• Data Quality Validation

         Reconciliation of modeling flows (demands > processes > resources) with ERP data

• Constraint-Based Planning
  Identification of bottlenecks across labour, equipment, and production lines 
• Scenario Simulation
  Evaluation of CI initiatives, staffing changes, and production adjustments before execution 

Quantified Business Benefits

The DTO replaced estimation and intuition with quantified, data-driven insight — giving Surrette’s leadership the operational clarity and financial evidence to plan with confidence. Benefits included: 

   Operational Efficiency

• Improved visibility into work centre performance
• Identification of resource constraints and inefficiencies

   Decision Quality

• Complete understanding of the labour requirements for each battery type produced
• Data-driven justification of future capital investments

   Continuous Improvement Enablement

• Structured platform to evaluate and prioritize process improvement initiatives 
• Improved visibility into non-value-added activities 

Implementation Timeline: ~ 9 months to full facility DTO

Surrette’s DTO implementation project was funded by NGen, Canada’s lead for Advanced Manufacturing. It was also a key component of a co-funded Engineering Co-op Student Program. In this approach, each phase of the project coincided with a 4-month student work term. The project was led by the Plant Manager and the ERP Manager with coaching assistance from an external CBP-certified partner consultant.

• Phase 1: Front-end process (3 months)
• Phase 2: Industrial batteries process (3 months)
• Phase 3: Monoblock battery processes & material handling (3 months)