CONNECTED FACTORIES.

JOINING THE MANY MOVING PARTS

Manufacturing is about transforming raw materials into finished goods that customers want. Typically this demands efficient management across many subject areas and processes. Not only is the information wide ranging, the management of the information needs to happen in an extremely time critical environment.

Connecting the business (potentially including suppliers and customers, as well as on-site facilities and logistics suppliers) provides the means by which you can manage “silo-ed” information in an effective manner, enabling both operational and quality performance targets to be achieved more easily and consistently.

PRODUCT LIFE MANAGEMENT.

SPECIFICATIONS: Are key to providing good operational control in a food and beverage manufacturing environment. It is the ability to define all aspects of food production via a clear definition of the product’s categorisation, control requirements, inventory management and planning features.

RECIPES: The recipe should support a number of functions including, mix weigh-up directly to the shop floor weigh-stations, materials requirements planning, inventory control, nutritional tables, labels, and product specifications etc.

LABELS: Accurate and consistently generated labels are key to the delivery of high quality products to the customer. All information that appears on the label should be stored at a single point within the system and drawn on to provide batch related information inline in real time as part of normal production processes.

More on product management

SHOP FLOOR.

To effectively manage all operations, systems should cover a wide range of functions, including the financials and compliance areas. For example, financial analysis should extend out into real time operations and compliance (e.g. Food Safety, Health & Safety, Risk Managment etc) should be “in line” to gain the most benefit. If this can be acheived, the operators have really useful tools for effective decision making to grow the business.

BRICK BY BRICK

This can be daunting when considered in a comprehensive manner, however the key for a medium sized manufacturing business it to take a brick by brick approach. This ensures that any block put in place, can be built on to achieve a complete structure, and when needed, can be restructured to extend its functionality.

AUTOMATION

IIOT (Industrial Internet of Things) has driven a much more standard approach to integration. This enables the back office information to extend to automation within the factory. This level of integration provides a platform for extensive gains in efficiency.

REPORTING AND CONTROL.

All the pieces need to fit together

QUALITY MANAGEMENT

There are many subject areas that have direct relevancy to acheivIing high quality standards. Working together each module needs to provide the core information across all internal, customer, industry and regulatory standards. Some of these areas are:

  • Supplier Management
  • Staff On-boarding
  • Training
  • Health & Safety
  • Corrective Actions Management
  • Incidents
  • Audits
  • HACCP
  • Batch Track & Trace
  • Risk Management

IN-LINE QUALITY CONTROL

Quality control measurement systems are best embedded within the normal manufacturing execution system processes. This enables more accurate and timely data to be collected for auditing and management purposes.

To achieve cost effective automation of the data collection processes connections to machinery should comply with generic industry standards (i.e. OPC).

SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH

REAL TIME

FASTER & BETTER