As dietary habits in the U.S. shift toward healthier options, one trend hasn’t changed: Americans are still busy and seek meals that are fast and easy to prepare.
If you’ve ever played “Whac-A-Mole” on the boardwalk or at an arcade, you can get a sense of the frustration that both food and beverage processors and architecture/engineering/construction (AEC) firms are feeling in today’s economy—fix one problem, another pops up.
For an edible oil processor, the best way to efficiently manage unique characteristics of different products was by adopting modern control loop performance monitoring software with the ability to recognize different operating states.
Most manufacturing operations are constantly faced with change, and therefore they must be designed to adapt. Change routinely presents itself in the form of different production recipes, varying material properties, irregular equipment availability, weather extremes and many other factors. What’s more, change often includes several of these variables concurrently, and each may interact with others—adding still more complexity.
A line not running at optimum efficiency and producing less than expected might only be second to unplanned downtime in terms of headaches faced in manufacturing—both of which can be caused by a weak link in the production line. We spoke to Craig Souser, president and CEO of JLS Automation, about overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), about maintenance best practices and strategies to use in order to keep a line operating at its fullest.