For food & beverage producers, improving performance means maximizing production, ensuring quality, increasing reliability and improving overall sustainability. A short 2-page article, 4 Tips to Optimize Your Food & Beverage Production highlights some ways to drive these performance improvements.
The four tips include:
- Monitor machine health using analytics
- Optimize your existing equipment
- Leverage smart sensing in Clean-in-Place (CIP) technology
- Accelerate new product startups with digital twin
Monitoring machinery can greatly improve performance.
Manually inspecting machines and running them until they break down is a recipe for unforeseen downtime and costly repairs. By leveraging machine data, process information, and analytics food and beverage manufacturers gain access to information not seen through traditional means. Rather than performing manual checkups that lack visibility into continually changing conditions, operators can use analytic tools to monitor machine health in real-time alerting to potential breakdowns before they happen.
Often additional measurements can drive performance improvements.
Using measurement technologies to monitor recipe and batch quality can cut costs, ensure quality and increase production. By implementing real-time concentration temperature, conductivity, pH and density measurements, manufacturers can eliminate expensive product recalls and wasted production and sampling time.
Hygienic processes are critical for food & beverage producers.
Manual CIP processes are time intensive and waste large amounts of resources like water, energy and chemicals. By using modern sensing technologies in CIP like transmitters, flow and density meters, food and beverage producers can verify the correct time, flow rate and temperature profiles. These instruments can also detect interfaces between liquids to reduce changeover time and ensure that correct fluids are used at the proper concentration.
Aside from using modern sensing technologies for each CIP systems, automation optimization is another effective strategy. Automation makes quality information accessible and allows key performance indicators to be set. Over time, capturing the right metrics can enable a “golden batch” metric to be set allowing you to measure subsequent cleaning cycles against a known standard—this optimizes cleaning efficiency and changeover time leading to improved productivity. It can also reduce troubleshooting and maintenance time—precious hours that can be used for production instead.
Digital twins provide a digital representation of the plant and processes.
By first testing and making process improvements using the digital twin, engineers can leverage an high fidelity model of the process dynamics that can be thoroughly tested before construction begins. New operating procedures can then be verified before implementation, reducing labor and startup times.
Read the article for specifics on each of these four tips. If you´ll be joining us next week in Grapevine, Texas for the Emerson Exchange conference, there are a number of Food / Beverage-related sessions. Here is a small sampling:
- [3-1187a] Optimizing Beverage Fermentation Set up with Valve Selection and Automation
- [3-1547a] Optimize Energy Usage and Reduce Manual Labor with Clean in Place (CIP) 4
- [1-1978a] Automating Pressure Based Density to Increase Batch Efficiency
- [3-1863a] Dispense, Monitor & Maintain – A Smart Beverage Dispensing Solution Compliant to NSF
- [1-1463a] How IIOT helped F&B industry to become Environmentally Responsible, Sustainable and more Rentable.
