Drives & Controls March 2022

26 n FOOD AND BEVERAGE March 2022 www.drivesncontrols.com Data: a vital ingredient for food and beverage T oday’s factories are becoming data centres with great potential for collecting valuable insights on any area of factory operations, from production throughputs to machine usage and availability. Industry 4.0 has paved the way for smart data- driven production plants. However, despite the massive wealth of facts and figures now potentially available to food and beverage manufacturers, Keith Thornhill, head of food and beverage for Siemens UK & Ireland, believes the sector hasn’t laid firm enough foundations to unlock the full potential of the data. Recent research by Siemens found that 81% of food and beverage manufacturers in the UK and Ireland say they are exploring more ways of capturing, managing and analysing production line data. But despite high uptake and good intentions, just 38% of manufacturers feel that they have “somewhat” achieved data maturity. “Without the data to help measure operations, it is often difficult – or impossible – to know where further investment is needed,”Thornhill explains. “Until manufacturers have an accurate real-time view of production, they have no benchmark of production efficiency and therefore a limited idea of the performance benefits and scale of improvement that can be gained. Expertise is needed to help turn data into actionable intelligence.” According to Thornhill, the baked goods and confectionery sector is a good example of where connected, real-time data can really help to transform manufacturing. “As is the case with most short shelf-life foods, producing baked goods at volume is a mixture of controlled processes and complex science, with many variables having an impact on performance,” he says. “Tracking and analysing production data is a big step forward in reducing waste and improving efficiency. Conditions need to be controlled to optimise quality and throughput. And parameters, such as humidity and heat, as well as supply chain variability, need to be monitored as part of root cause analysis. Uncontrolled variability is normally the reason why production lines stop unintentionally. “By tracking the necessary processes through technology, and connecting these data sources to central dashboards for visualisation, manufacturers can spot exactly where their faults and inefficiencies lie and act quickly to prevent failures or improve operations.” But it is not just cutting downtime that can save costs. “One of my bakery customers estimated that it could save over £1m a year by improving the control of its chilling process to reduce energy and potentially increase capacity,”Thornhill reports. “The key to discovering this process improvement was process simulation – and, of course, data.” Streamlining where possible is the answer. Working out where seconds can be shaved off production schedules or where energy usage can be reduced is vital for manufacturers that need to produce perishable products quickly. One example where a technological intervention helped to boost efficiency and cut costs was an installation at Automation, intelligent processes and the vast amounts of storage space available in the cloud have laid the foundations for new strategies for the food and beverage industry, based in collecting and analysing data to generate insights that can improve production. Gathering data from its production processes has helped the chocolate- maker Kinnerton to obtain a real-time picture of its whole production operation for the first time. Siemens’head of food and beverage, Keith Thornhill:“Automation and digitalisation is within reach of all manufacturers, regardless of size”