Why do you need an MES for Food and Beverage production?

So, what are the challenges faced today in Manufacturing, particularly in Food and Beverage:

• Changing consumer demands. Consumers are armed with information and have higher expectations for what they eat and drink. For example, many are becoming more nutritionally aware, with a desire for naturally sourced ingredients, environmentally friendly packaging and humane sources of farming.
• Product differentiation. Innovative and growing economies have led to the development of many new food and beverage manufacturers, as well as a multitude of products across different categories. This choice should be good for the consumer, but you may find your organisation overwhelmed. It’s the job of established and new manufacturers alike to differentiate themselves from the competition and win traction with consumers.
• Margins can be tiny. Costs come in many different forms, including material, labour costs, packaging, and shipping expenses. Reducing cost pressures is directly related to increasing productivity. As an example, if you can increase yields, you reduce the amount of scrap and rework.
• Regulatory and compliance. Product safety regulations are complex and vary from region to region. Something that is acceptable in one country may not be acceptable in another, leading to a possible and unnecessary product recall, or the inability to distribute your products.
• Food traceability and recall management. Food and Beverage requires traceability of products as they pass through the long and complex supply chain, allowing businesses to verify the history and location of a product through documented, recorded verification.

The above challenges show the need for food and beverage manufacturers to modernise their operations. By creating the right infrastructure within their businesses, they can gain competitive advantage, improve traceability, reduce wastage and be confident in meeting all regulations globally.

Most of the essential activities take place on the shop floor. However, many food and beverage manufacturing facilities are dominated by manual procedures, outdated equipment, and human operator errors, leading to bottlenecks and downtime.

The need for automation is no longer an option as it was perhaps 10 or 15 years ago. Keeping pace with competitors necessitates the use of automated industrial solutions, and the ability to make real-time data-driven decisions, resulting greater efficiency. The ability to connect to shop floor production equipment is far easier today than in the past.

The drive for common information and communication standards has resulted in empowering manufacturing organisations of all sizes to find ways of making significant improvements in production efficiency without making a massive financial outlay.

Here at Intouch Monitoring we have developed an easy to implement MES solution that is completely scalable. The concept is simple: start by connecting to a few critical machines on your shop floor, collect and analyse basic operational data, and make data-driven decisions that ensure production is optimised to meet changing demands.

The resulting improvements are rapid and provide a fast and easy justification to scale the installation to include additional equipment and functionality within a matter of weeks. We offer a free no-risk trial of our software platform, allowing companies to see tangible results before making a longer-term commitment.

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