Case Study: Collaboration in the Food and Beverage Industry Using Business Process Management

 

For the Food and Beverage Industry, keeping profitable operations means an informed workforce, tuned equipment, and quick response to any adverse or unplanned conditions.
For many organizations, standardized practices are critical for maintaining a baseline that can be measured and improved, especially if multiple locations are involved.

Business Process Management, or BPM, is a collaboration solution that allows organizations to establish baseline processes that can be standardized and deployed over multiple lines and sites. The food and beverage industry is a great example of an industry that can benefit from BPM, since they establish SOP's (Standard Operating Procedures) and implement, enforcing predicable and optimized performance.

An example is a Wonderware customer who is a leading blottler for a major global beverage brand in Europe.

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

Because then I've just written 3,000! The beauty of a product like Wonderware Workflow is that it enables cross-enterprise collaboration on a single platform. Whether you access workflow using your mobile device, or via an email, text message or other means, Workflow ensures that your processes and procedures stay intact and active. 

We have customers today using workflow to solve a variety of operations challenges: from enterprise integration, to quality management, to validating processes within a regulated environment.  Workflow enables you to visualize, model and capture all activities surrounding a series of operations.  It does not matter which industry you are in, or if you have 100, or 100,000 employees--it's scalable, adapatable and easy to implement.

Want proof?  Read this success story by Fujirebio--who makes biomarkers, and uses Workflow as part of their validated manufacturing solution.

Operations Innovation & Transformation – Value Chain Management, Part 2 of 5

by Stan Devries, Senior Director Solutions Architecture, Invensys|Schneider Electric

The 4 quadrants described in the article “OperationsInnovation & Transformation – the 4 Types Part 1 of 5" positions the upper left quadrant as a strategy for using a “value chain” of physical assets in a new way:

In this quadrant, a group of similar industrial operations (2 or more) adapt their performance objectives, business processes and accompanying hiring and information strategies to optimize the “value chain.”  The move is to unifying the industrial enterprise over multiple sites (in groups or as a whole), with a more holistic view in terms of operating strategy and performance management.

Why IT and Automation Go Hand in Hand

I recently responded to a post on LinkedIn in the Automation & Control subgroup. There, a young engineer was asking the question, "if I am in automation, why do I need to know IT." 

That is a great question and over the years that I have been in automation, I've experienced first a chasm between IT and automation (one company I visited 15 years ago had a CIO that had never gone on the plant floor!) to a gradual alignment and now, cross over between the two practices.

Industry Week: US Manufacturing Expands for Third Straight Month

http://www.industryweek.com/global-economy/us-manufacturing-expands-third-straight-month?NL=IW-07&Issue=IW-07_20130904_IW-07_93&YM_RID=maryanne.steidinger@invensys.com&YM_MID=1420302&sfvc4enews=42

Good news on the economic front--manufacturing has expanded (gone beyond the magic 50) for the third month in a row.  Certainly, we in the industrial automation industry applaud this condition, for it means companies are building, processing and producing goods that consumers want...and it also foretells of expansions, improvements, and additional capacity and capabilities.

We've seen an uptick, globally, in manufacturers desiring standardization, production operations management improvements, and extensions to existing software functionality. And of course, the automation industry (especially Invensys) is there to support your efforts with products such as MES, Workflow, and EMI.

Increasing MES Productivity with Workflow: A White Paper

http://iom.invensys.com/EN/pdfLibrary/WhitePaper_Wonderware_IncreasingMESProductivityWithWorkflow_07-11.pdf

this white paper, authored by Tom Troy of #Invensys, aptly describes the benefits received by coupling a Manufacturing Execution System with Workflow.   MES, as you may know, is a comprehensive application that covers the transformation of raw materials through finished goods within an enterprise.  Many different industries use MES to ensure quality, compliance, high yields, consistent throughput to drive productivity, safety and brand management.

Adding workflow to an MES builds capabilities for "closed loop" remediation of processes, be it corrective action, alarm management, noncompliance release, or any number of operations where collaboration between workers or departments are required.

For more information on #MES, click here.  For more information on #Workflow, visit here.

Invensys and Callisto Integration Form Alliance

Invensys announced yesterday an alliance with Callisto Integration to provide services and implementation resources for complex operations management projects within the food and beverage and Consumer Packaged Goods industries.

The net of this relationship is to offer customers with a solution, not discrete products that must then be integrated, developed and implemented.  Callisto has many years of experience with the Wonderware "advanced applications" including MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) and Workflow.  For more details, please follow this link:

 http://global.wonderware.com/EN/pages/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=574

ArchestrA Workflow Software for the Oil & Gas Industry

ArchestrA Workflow is "industrial" Business Process Management (BPM) software.  It is used within industry to standardize decision making, make operations more predictable and routine, and enforce collaboration between process stakeholders. Today we'll look at an industry-specific use of ArchestrA Workflow: for the Oil and Gas Industry.

Using BPM/Workflow in the Pharmaceutical Industry

A primary focus of the pharmaceutical industry is the capture and standardization of operating practices.  Repeatability, documentation, and compliance to regulations are at the forefront of any pharma operation. 

A typical pharmaceutical manufacturer will have industrial automation and software applications that manage the physical operations--Programmable Logic Controllers or Distributed Control Systems, handling the temperatures, speeds, movement and packaging; batch recipe management to handle recipes,  procedures and processes, such as Clean In Place; Recipe validation; audit trails; and version control; and sensors and other discrete automation devices which contribute to authentication, confirmation, and location of the products as they travel through the process.

There is something more that these manufacturers can do...add workflow to their solution stack.

What Keeps You Up At Night?

How many times have you asked this question--to your peers, to important customers, during strategy meetings.  It is an effective way of cutting through the noise to uncover the essence of key care-abouts. 

I've been thinking about that from an industrial automation perspective.  The industry itself is nearing 45+ years, beginning with the development of the PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) back in the 70's.  Their key care-abouts at the time were to replace unstable and single purpose relays with a device that could multi-task different plant control functions, that could be programmed in a language that the plant electrician could understand, and could more effectively manage multitudes of control sensors.

Repost: Increasing Productivity with Workflow

http://www.mbtmag.com/articles/2012/12/increasing-productivity-workflow

Excellent article from Invensys' Tom Troy on the benefits of workflow for industrial enterprises.

ArchestrA Workflow Test Drive: Workflow for Free

 

By Larry Claussen

Business Development Manager, ArchestrA Workflow, Invensys Operations Management
 

Have you ever wanted to just try software out before buying? Especially software that you might not be familiar with? A lot of our customers are telling us that a new site we’ve created for ArchestrA Workflow Software allows them to easily, and non-intrusively, gain familiarity with the application and its abilities before they actually buy it.

 

 

Archestra Workflow Software is BPM—Business Process Management—software.  It allows people, equipment, and systems to collaborate together, providing enforcement through embedded business rules.  Think of a corrective action procedure, or alarm management practices—you probably use workflow now in order to address and correct them. Well, ArchestrA Workflow Software takes it one step further, by making that remediation part of a “system of record” so that it is repeatable, enforceable, and documented.