There is a strategic shift happening in food manufacturing today. It's no longer enough to simply meet quality standards. Today, leaders in the industry are balancing increased consumer expectations, maintaining food quality, and rising input costs. Consumers are demanding more:

  • Transparency
  • Traceability
  • Sustainability
  • Customization

Consumers want products that come with a commitment to conscious production. They want to know what is on their plate, where it came from, and how it was made. Additionally, consumers expect consistent taste and texture every time they purchase a food item from a particular brand, but they also want more choices in flavors, ingredients, and recipes.

Manufacturers can exceed these expectations by focusing on what happens during the production process. Optimizing cooking, baking, or mixing processes allows manufacturers to identify areas where they can make small enhancements that have a high impact on flavor, consistency, or other quality metrics for a particular recipe. Continuous, real-time monitoring improves consistency from batch to batch and reduces changeover time between recipes. This allows manufacturers to create more seasonal flavors and varying recipes to meet consumer preferences without sacrificing food quality or profit margins.

Imagine sophisticated sensors embedded throughout your production line, gathering data on everything from temperature and pressure to flow and vibration. They provide a detailed picture of what's happening in real time, at every millisecond. With full control over your production data, manufacturers can decide when and how to collect data, where to stream it, and how it is further analyzed.

Here are 4 steps to help you select a proof of concept project and evaluate new technologies to make it successful.

Step 1: Find Strategic Alignment. Define the objective for an Industry 4.0 project. Start with one application that aligns with an important and measurable business goal.

  • Could reducing energy costs increase your profitability?
  • Could reducing water consumption help you meet sustainability targets?
  • Would reducing line changeover time allow you to experiment with seasonal flavors, new recipes, or customized batches? 

Step 2: Evaluate & Build Your Technology Stack. Evaluate if you already have the right technologies to support an IIoT initiative and how easily they scale without hiring integration specialists or consultants.

  • Technology evaluation: Identify technologies such as smart industrial sensors, flexible communication protocols, and software platforms that can deliver the information you need to prove the concept will work.
    • Technologies should deliver on a proof of concept and easily scale to cover your entire facility.
Connect to the plant floor. Image provided by IFM
  • Data Integration: Ensure that your data sources are designed to integrate with other technologies and software. Selecting more open and interoperable technologies allows you to futureproof your facility by avoiding significant future upgrade costs.
    • Open source technologies help you avoid locking your data into proprietary systems.
    • Vendors committed to interoperability are more likely to prepare you for the future as a feature of their hardware and software.
Transform data into information.Image provided by IFM


Step 3: Implement Process Optimization. To adequately measure return on investment, you will need to benchmark current processes with automation and visualization of data collection. This allows you to quantify the success of an initiative quickly.

  • Process Mapping: Document and analyze existing processes to identify areas for improvement.
  • Automation Opportunities: Identify tasks that can be automated to ensure trust in the data.
  • Lean Implementation: Implement lean practices to reduce waste and streamline production before more complex initiatives.
  • Monitoring & Analytics: Implement real-time monitoring, and data trending and analysis to measure performance and drive continuous improvement. 

 

Get actionable insights.Image provided by IFM


Step 4: Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement. Establish a process for an ongoing review of your technology stack. This helps build a culture of continuous improvement by regularly researching new technologies and ensuring you have the best solutions to fit your facility as you grow or business goals change. This helps achieve and continue alignment with management.

  • Periodic Reviews: Regularly review and assess the Industry 4.0 strategy to ensure alignment with evolving business goals.
  • Invest in R&D: Invest in research and development to stay aware of technological advancements.

Think of Industry 4.0 as providing a guardian angel to watch over production lines. A technology stack that includes smart sensors, flexible communication protocols, and an optional cloud connection can detect even the slightest deviations from optimal conditions, allowing you to immediately adjust parameters before mistakes happen. It catches anomalies between the “golden batch” and a deviation large enough to trigger a shutdown in production. Today, that tolerance band avoids food safety issues but often does not catch changes in flavor or texture that consumers might notice. You can reduce scrap rates and recalls by implementing quality control and traceability steps throughout production, instead of isolating it as a final step in the process.

Adopting Industry 4.0 initiatives in a food or beverage manufacturing facility requires a strategic approach and careful planning.  This checklist can serve as a starting point to help you assess if you have the right resources, and a guide to selecting new technologies to fill any gaps, before starting an Industry 4.0 initiative. Learn more  about the benefits of using machine data to optimize production.


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