How digital technology can transform food and beverage manufacturing plants

In the food and beverage industry, products must meet high-quality standards and regulations to be suitable for consumers. Food and beverage manufacturers need to control their processes strictly. Digital technology can also assist with quality assurance and even with making improvements to enhance the quality of food and beverage products overall.

Data is crucial to quality assurance. With digital technology, you can track all kinds of data related to your production process. This allows you to detect variations in the process that could lead to quality issues in real-time. This enables you to quickly correct these issues, potentially saving you significant amounts of time and money. That is especially important in batch production, in which products are made in groups rather than one by one.

If an error does occur, you can use the data you collected during the production process to determine why. Advanced solutions can also allow you to record and play-back your processes visually to troubleshoot any error quickly and more precisely. This can help you to prevent the issue from happening again in the future.

You can furthermore use your data as well as data analytics technology to find ways to improve the quality of your products and maintain the precise process control needed to meet quality standards. Analyzing historical data may reveal patterns related to what leads to higher quality products, enabling you to make adjustments to your production processes quickly and even remotely.

zenon, helps you to collect quality-related data and to control your processes precisely. zenon’s Batch Control and Recipe Group Manager tools support you in creating, managing and executing recipes, control processes, and analyzing production. zenon makes batch reports available immediately following production, which helps make the quality assurance process more efficient. zenon’s ability to easily integrate with other systems helps companies to more easily oversee and control their processes to improve quality.

Line management using digital technology supports you gain greater visibility into and control of your production lines, enabling you to make improvements to drive better results. Even if your line consists of various types of machines and devices, you can integrate them and view their data in one system with a solution such as zenon.

This connectivity makes it easier to uncover ways to optimize your lines gradually. It also supports you by quickly identifying changes and issues so you can respond to and correct them.

The data you collect can also inform analyses and reports that present data in a clear way and make it easier to spot potential improvements. As data is collected in real-time, the production team can see information about the current batch, events and alarms throughout the process, helping them to control the process and correct faults. 

Production processes create significant amounts of data, which you can even store cloud-based. This storage method allows you to easily combine data from different sources, access data from anywhere and analyze both recent and historical data for various purposes.

You might use this data, for example, for predictive maintenance, which involves tracking equipment performance to determine the ideal time to perform maintenance work and repair. This helps reduce maintenance costs, reduce downtime and increase the productivity of your lines. It can also help with improving overall equipment effectiveness, workflow management, documentation and more.

Manufacturing food and beverage products can be a complicated process involving many different pieces of equipment, people and tasks. To improve this process, it’s helpful to have as comprehensive a view of it as possible. Digital technology can help enable this comprehensive view by connecting the various systems involved and gathering all of the data in one place.

Digital technology also allows you to control and alter processes without having to go where the relevant pieces of machinery are physically. With a centralized system, you can see all the relevant data from wherever you are and make adjustments remotely.

This integration can also help you to improve asset management and increase your overall equipment effectiveness. Having all of your data available in one place helps you to more easily identify issues that may be reducing effectiveness.

It can also be useful for avoiding errors in production and handling emergencies. The integration of functions such as alarm lists, event lists, camera views, trends and key performance indicator displays allows users to receive real-time, role-based information if an incident occurs. This enables you to respond quickly and effectively, increasing equipment availability and productivity.

With zenon you can easily create your ”cockpit” to control your plant and bring it to optimum performance. Don’t waste your time looking for the right information – instead, spend your time using the right information to improve your processes.

Digital technology can also help you extend machine lifecycles. For example, machine builders can use zenon as a retrofit solution to improve the lifetime of their machines by upgrading them using software. zenon’s backward compatibility with applications enables more flexibility in hardware replacement. 

Making upgrades using compatible software, instead of purchasing new replacement machines, can save companies significant amounts of money while still providing them with the benefits of an upgrade.

Reducing the energy consumption of a manufacturing plant reduces costs and also helps to reduce environmental impact. These benefits contribute to sustainability goals and support companies in their Net- Zero transition. 

This can lead to increased sales and investment and may also result in more loyalty from both customers and employees.

Tracking energy data may reveal that certain processes or pieces of equipment are disproportionate energy intensive. It can also reveal unexpected spikes in energy use, which typically indicate a problem, such as a malfunctioning piece of machinery.

Tracking and analyzing energy data is a crucial part of creating an energy management system that complies with standards such as ISO 50001.

With digital technology, you can automatically record energy data in real time, increasing the accuracy and efficiency of your data recording. You can also combine this data with historical data. This information can then be used for dashboards, alarm lists and reports.

Consider: what is the relationship between the production data and the actual energy consumption data? How does this compare to other production locations? What trends and forecasts can be predicted based on the current machine data? When you use zenon, you gain knowledge that improves your existing manufacturing process in a sustainable way and sheds light on dark areas thanks to customized reports.

Because of this automatic data collection, you can spend more time on making your facilities more energy-efficient and less time tracking data manually. A digital approach, especially with a versatile platform like zenon, also enables you to more easily combine energy data from across your systems. You can even track the consumption of multiple energy sources, from electricity to gas to compressed air.

Digital technology increases the flexibility with which producers can monitor and control the production process. This supports creativity, allows for more variety in products and can even speed time to market. The capabilities of zenon as a process control system are great and offer lots of opportunities. zenon can be used and integrated easily within many fields in food & beverage processing. 

While zenon has use cases for a multitude of food and beverage production purposes, breweries make for an excellent example of this capability in action. With an automation platform that works with various kinds of hardware and integrates easily with existing systems, you have the freedom to use new technologies and try out new ideas. You can try new recipes more quickly and with fewer investments in new equipment. Digital technology also helps you to control custom brewing processes more efficiently, even when brewing in small batches.

With recipe control systems that are based on PLCs, it can be difficult to launch new recipes. zenon, however, is based on the ISA-88 standard for batch process control. This setup enables you to use equipment flexibly and produce multiple types of beer on one system. Brewers can, therefore, try new recipes without needing to reprogram equipment.

This flexibility enables breweries to efficiently update their processes and products to keep up with changes in the market. In addition to new products, zenon lets you introduce new maintenance concepts, production processes and functionalities. Many of the needed functionalities are available out-of-the-box, making for easier and faster implementation.That simplifies the management and maintenance of the software, reducing the training and IT support burden because there is just one platform to manage.

The true value of zenon comes when looking at its universal abilities that translate to the food and beverage industry at large. Being able to monitor and control your inventory and the production process with greater flexibility enables you to produce a wider variety of products and more quickly and cost-effectively try out new ideas.
In this way, zenon is an enabler for sustainable decision making.

With zenon you have a single software platform that can manage all these use cases and deliver all these benefits.