Why the Food and Beverage Industry Depends On Automation to Help Them Reach Their Goals

by Michael Schwarz, MES/EMI Product Marketing Manager, Invensys

The Food and Beverage industries have been always on the forefront of technology,  with investments in automation of processes to secure profitability on high volume and low margin products.

Today, the race is on in squeezing the maximum capacity from production lines, to streamline any process, to reduce any loss in product, quality and all used resources and to streamline any process gain with superior connectivity to all automation systems. Food and Beverage industries have to satisfy the requirements of food safety regulations which requires to document product and processes and define and prepare corrective actions, What is mostly considered as additional cost is at the same time a foundation to optimize cost and reduce losses as well protect brand equity.

Wonderware has served the Food and Beverage Industry for over 25 years. Why? Superior connectivity to all automated equipment and systems; a market-leading Human Machine Interface product, InTouch, and it has evolved to provide the full stack of manufacturing operations software functionality maintaining the HMI as the unified user interface for the shop floor operator.

Built on a common application platform for all real-time data, Food and Beverage customers can add capabilities in their supervisory, MES or Batch management functionality, including plant equipment performance tracking and inline quality management. For many F&B companies,  equipment downtime tracking and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) monitoring aids in visibility to such events as energy consumption, downtime and line stoppages.  When you put OEE in operational context to the process, it can become the starting point of effective cost optimization strategies. 

So automation solutions such as those coming from Wonderware allow monitoring and controlling quality in real-time, to improve product consistency and compliance as well as performance.  Automation solutions can enable  'perfect orders' and lead time reductions, increased agility through shorter setup times, smaller lots and faster replenishment as well as improved OEE. For most F&B companies, it's not the wave of the future--it's a standard mode of operation.