Many industries, such as the food & beverage industry, have felt the supply chain shocks caused by the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic. Optimizing existing production is more important than ever to meet the changes in supply and demand.
I caught up with Emerson’s Marcus Parsons about some of the things food & beverage producers can do to optimize production. He noted that the top priority is to keep the production and packaging machines running reliably and efficiently.
Traditionally these machines are run and periodically manually inspected. If something is missed or the inspection interval too long the machine can break down leading to production loss and costly repairs.
A better approach is continuous monitoring with operational analytics-based applications to turn this stream of data into actionable information. This combination of additional sensors on critical machine components and analytics as part of a machine health monitoring system helps to enable predictive maintenance practices.
Marcus shared how KNet Analytics use key performance indicator (KPI) expert functions to monitor the health of the machinery across the facility and provide actionable information to help prioritize the maintenance activities. KNet combines advanced analytics, such as AI, machine learning, to create process and assets-specific analytical models. It not just identifies the predictive insights but also pinpoints the true root cause of the process or asset anomaly.
Watch a demo of Emerson’s KNet analytics here.
In addition, Emerson’s edge computing enables food and beverage manufacturers to advance into data-driven digital manufacturing, enabling engineers to access critical data, monitor for upcoming issues and virtualize everything right on the plant floor. This data and analytical processing provides visualization either local in the facility or extended into cloud-based applications to enable remote monitoring for maximized reliability.
One example is in monitoring the health of palletizers. The Busse SJI Viper High Speed Bulk Palletizer and Alpha Turbo TM High Speed Depalletizer have been paired with this machine health monitoring solution to give manufacturers a solution for greater overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by monitoring, in real-time, critical motion and pneumatic system parameters. These parameters include air flow, pressure, vacuum, mechanical actuation speeds and motor vibration.
The result of this approach is that packaging lines gain efficiencies by predicting problems before they lead to off-spec product or unplanned slowdowns or shutdowns, increasing reliability and overall production levels for food & beverage manufacturers.
Visit the Food & Beverage section on Emerson.com for more on this and other solutions to drive improved performance in safety, reliability, efficiency and production.
