Food Engineering's recent Food Automation & Manufacturing Conference addressed several high-tech Industry 4.0 topics, including predictive maintenance (PdM). I’d like to show how you can use IIoT tools to improve your maintenance program—and maybe even better your OEE scores in the process.
Some food and beverage plants are potentially well-suited to totally automated process control. Other applications may not be so easy to automate but can still benefit from incremental process control implementations.
Precise control over food and beverage production is in the spotlight as health-conscious consumers are increasingly paying close attention to the ingredients and labeling of their products. So, to protect consumers, governments are closely regulating the traceability, manufacturing, and labeling of food and beverage products. Meanwhile, increased competition and narrow margins in food manufacturing are making efficient production essential in driving ROI and business viability.
Because of increasing consumer interest in a more diverse product selection, healthy foods, and more convenient meal preparation, food manufacturers in dairy, meat, baked goods and produce are supplying a widening array of new SKUs in both chilled and frozen formats. This places an ever increasing demand on cold storage, and with older facilities, it’s not very easy to automate them.
Seven suppliers from mechanical engineering, industrial automation and software announced the foundation of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance at the Hannover Messe 2019 trade fair. With this cooperation, the companies want to overcome proprietary solutions and give a boost to the digital transformation of the European industry.
The digitalization journey for food and beverage processors relies on careful consideration of numerous factors to be a success. Among them are sensors to collect data, applications to manage that data, and cloud-based systems to help oversee the entire process.
If you're not embarking on the digital transformation journey, you'll be flying blind without the instrumentation and computing capabilities to keep you focused on producing quality, food-safe product and staying ahead of your competition.
Enter EPIC—a controller capable of handling analog and discrete I/O with direct connection to sensors and actuators, running real-time tasks on board and connecting safely to cloud-based and on-premises applications.