Food for thought: Food and Beverage Industry eBook

How to improve food and beverage manufacturing through actionable data.

Make data the lifeblood of your food and beverage manufacturing

The rapid expansion of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has created a dilemma for companies in the food and beverage sector.

The IIoT is recasting the role of data from a useful asset to the lifeblood that drives production decisions. Unfortunately for most food and beverage manufacturers, a combination of legacy equipment, skills gaps in an ageing workforce and the struggle to identify and measure the right data means they are not accomplishing anything close to the progress seen in other industries.

Learn how to:

Achieve tangible ROI through digital transformation

This ebook will show you that none of these obstacles is insurmountable, and that you can achieve genuine ROI by digitally transforming your food and beverage manufacturing.

Once you have finished, you will have an in-depth understanding of how to access and capitalise on your operational, business and transactional data to improve product quality and create more efficient production and packaging operations.

Implement knowledge-driven operations

You will also learn how knowledge-driven operations can connect your people, processes and technology across every level for better collaboration, faster problem solving and improved innovation within your organisation and its supply chain.

As the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and information, Rockwell Automation are specialists in digitally transforming manufacturing operations. We have helped organisations in more than 80 countries to translate the deluge of information into useful, actionable insights, and we have put this ebook together to help you understand how to achieve the same thing for your business.

You will learn how data can improve production performance with infrastructure changes that work straight away. We will also demonstrate how actionable data can be used to reduce manufacturing complexity, increase flexibility and bring new products to market faster, as well as improving the maintenance schedules of your capital equipment to be more predictive.

Removing the guesswork and variability

Valuable data is everywhere in food and beverage manufacturing, but at the moment it is not being captured or used effectively to improve operations. As a result, your employees are relying on their own personal experience and judgment when making decisions, instead of basing them on accurate information.

Making plant-wide production data accessible to every level of your workforce would solve this problem, but your legacy equipment was not designed with today’s connectivity in mind, resulting in data being produced in silos.

We will explain how you can integrate data across multiple systems and convert it more easily into formats that employees can instantly access, understand and use to make better decisions.

Creating more efficient production and packaging operations

Consumer demand for single-serving size, custom products has resulted in a recent explosion of SKUs, with the production process becoming significantly more complex as a result.

The need to increase speed to market from idea to launch has also pushed food and beverage manufacturers further towards automated solutions.

Gaining better control of quality and costs

As consumer behaviour has moved towards purchasing locally sourced fresh foods, food and beverage manufacturers have had to adjust the raw products and recipes they use in production.

With an increased consumer focus on health benefits, and governments introducing additional regulations to improve food safety, there is even greater pressure to reformulate your products, meaning your need to manage commodity costs and improve yields has grown significantly.

This ebook will show how actionable data can reduce cost and waste in your supply chain, helping you to meet quality metrics and improve yields.

ROI is easier than you think

Projects can be easy and cost-effective to implement. Modern automation equipment is designed to generate production data and projects can be implemented with minimal disruption to operations. It also means you can start with a small pilot project and scale up, which typically leads to a rapid and positive ROI.

Most companies find that ROI from initial upgrades quickly fund more initiatives, and eventually deliver a seamless convergence of operations and information, increasing efficiency and productivity across the enterprise.

With many other manufacturers already enjoying IIoT success, it really is important to start investing now. Those with capable IIoT infrastructures enjoyed the largest productivity and profit increases.

Assess your own operations

The first step in developing your own knowledge-driven operations is defining which business goal it will help you meet or which production challenge it will help solve. Defining goals or outcomes upfront will help drive decisions about what data must be collected, what information must be delivered to workers at different levels, and what technology solutions will be needed.

After all, the key function areas have their own primary concerns, for example, IT cares about standardisation and network security, while operations is focused on labour productivity and OEE. These concerns, such as moving to regional production or maintaining quality standards, should be aligned to the needs of your business.

Take your next step towards operational excellence and download the complete eBook.