From 1-5 August, Gallagher Estate in Midrand hosted SA's leading food and beverage conference and exhibition where Futuristix-Wonderware invited leading manufacturers and system integrators to attend a Special Interest Group (SIG).
The SIG discussed such issues as the application of activity-based costing from the shop floor to production planning, product and quality tracking, condition-based maintenance, innovative warehousing approaches and the benefits of intranet technology - all as applicable to some of the difficult problems facing the food processing industry.
"The food processing industry is faced with unique issues," says Mike le Plastrier, MD of Futuristix-Wonderware. "These include inverted bills of material, multiple outputs, co-products and by-products, recycles and waste, multistage processes, product variations, catchweight, lot and sub-lot control, accurate costings, and the list goes on and on. If these issues are not addressed at all levels, food manufacturers cannot run their businesses efficiently. They may be able to work around them but, since they form such a fundamental part of food manufacturing and processing, it is hard to believe that avoiding tackling these issues head-on and routinely can be a tenable scenario."
The SIG showed clearly this wide range of issues together with the solutions available to deal with them not only in isolation but in an integrated manner. The production of dairy products such as cheese, for example, is characterised by imprecise manufacturing processes resulting in unpredictable end products that all have a narrow time window for classification, selection and delivery.
"This is typical of the industry," says le Plastrier. "Final products must conform rigidly to health, taste, consistency and many other parameters in spite of wide raw material variances. Controlling this must all happen in realtime and that is why it is important to have a unified approach that spans customer order management, production planning, production and order delivery. Only the strictest control and tracking at all these levels can minimise waste while satisfying customer demands profitably."
While scada solutions such as Wonderware's Factorysuite range of solutions have been invaluable in helping food manufacturers control their production processes, it is no longer enough to look at this technology in isolation of their other needs.
"The food manufacturing industry was never a priority in the minds of solution developers and vendors who all saw the discrete manufacturing industry as a more lucrative market," says le Plastrier. "It is not difficult to see why. Where discrete manufacturers tend to deal with a finite number of highly predictable components that all contribute to a single final product, food manufacturers have to handle a different scenario: unpredictable raw materials are combined, re-cycled and re-processed to yield a whole variety of end-products, co-products and by-products, some of which are used as raw materials for the same process.
Yet it all has to happen with the same control and predictability as with discrete manufacturing.
"That is why Wonderware's Protean has been specifically designed from the ground up to handle these complex issues. And it was not sufficient to design a product for a complex environment. It also had to be designed so that it could easily and quickly be adapted to any variations in that environment."
Copies of the highly informative white paper 'Operational solutions for the food and beverage industry' are available from Futuristix.
Futuristix
(011) 622 8181
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version