TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR FOOD & BEVERAGE PLANT FLOOR
AT A GLANCE
• Real-time, accurate production data, planned production schedules, quality checks, machine breakdowns, inventory levels, and more.
• Truly integrated information lets food and beverage manufacturers increase productivity, manage yield, improve inventory accuracy and food safety.
• A comprehensive manufacturing software solution offers a clear view of what is happening on the plant floor, delivering much needed connectivity, process automation, tracking and analysis.
PLEX.COM| 855.534.8012
WHITE PAPER | Take Control of your Food & Beverage Plant Floor
The Power of the Plant Floor
Today’s food and beverage manufacturing enterprise gains a key competitive advantage by implementing an extremely strong plant-floor control system, also known as a manufacturing execution system (MES). Many ERP software companies claim to support manufacturing companies but their solutions do little more than accounting, order entry, and other office tasks. They are not suitable for use on the plant floor, and they provide little value to the manufacturing process. Many manufacturers indicate that traditional ERP software actually hinders manufacturing, rather than helps it. The key is to implement a solution that allows manufacturers to take control of the plant floor; this solution must include job/production management, process instructions, production scheduling, ultra-detailed real-time inventory control, tool tracking, production tracking, traceability, labor tracking, PLC machine integration, and much more. This is what MES solutions offer, and they can be offered either as pure-play systems that connect or fully integrate with your ERP.
Baseline Capabilities
Baseline capabilities for a MES include:
• Simple, easy-to-use design for use by plant floor personnel.
• Real-time information reflecting up-to-date processes.
• Online for ease of access via a browser.
• Built-in barcode labeling.
• Built-in support for mobile/wireless handheld units.
• Built-in integration with machine PLCs.
• Built-in integration with weigh scales, metal detectors, and other equipment.
• Ability to trace all ingredients and raw materials.
An MES system delivers functionality supporting these capabilities in two main areas, R&D and production tracking.
“Capturing plant floor activity as it happens is a powerful way to increase overall visibility.”
Logistics
Manufacturing logistics determines packaging design, the ingredients needed, how those ingredients come together and the processes required from plan to completion.
Ingredients and Packaging Lists
Robust plant-floor reporting must track a master list of ingredients and appropriate associated packaging such as descriptions, ingredient or packaging type, and revisions. This includes an easy-to-use mechanism to upload small digital photos of each item. The ingredients list also provides links to many other areas of the system, where applicable, such as key ingredient dates, safe quality foods (SQF) , inventory, shipment history, problem history, and so on.
Process Routings
A process routing is the series of steps or recipe required to make an item. This function defines those steps. It includes the operation number, operation name, approved machines and suppliers, crew size, packaging type, and other key routing data.
PLEX.COM | 855.534.8012
2
WHITE PAPER
| Take Control of your Food & Beverage Plant Floor
3
Formula
Each food and beverage manufacturing process has a distinct formula which defines the components that make up a recipe. A flexible formula function offers a variety of other methods for visualizing and editing the formula.
Multi-Ingredient Production
An MES system must identify and control manufacturing processes where multiple ingredients are produced from a single operation. This is a critical capability for bakery, confectionery, and snack manufacturers.
Production Tracking
Robust production tracking provides tracking of machine production, including detailed and summarized reports. Good machine and plant floor tracking aids in reduction and scope of recalls which can cost manufacturers up to millions of dollars.
Control Panel
Control panels offer a simple-to-use, yet powerful user interface for plant-floor personnel to track and control machine status, labor hours, production, inventory, tooling, and much more.
Production Line Tracking
A workcenter log provides a detailed history of all events that occur at a machine, including all production, maintenance, and downtime. This function provides reports on uptime, availability, and machine efficiency. Far-reaching benefits result when integrating this function with other business processes including production tracking, inventory, labor tracking, tool-life tracking, and control plans.
Job Tracking System
This system tracks jobs and work orders within the food and beverage manufacturing facility. It depends on the situation, but usually a job represents an instruction to the plant floor to produce the right quantity of ingredients by a specific date. The system is the foundation for production scheduling and can be used for simple scheduling on its own.
Quality and Compliance Tracker
The ever-changing regulatory requirements, means manufacturers have to manually update and conform often. This could mean having staff that
constantly is updating paper-based documents and managing a slew of binders. Whether your compliance requirements range from SQF through BRC, a single integrated solution that gives you a view of all of your compliance and regulatory guidelines, eliminates the paper chase and provides structure to your audits.
Setup Tracking
Setup tracking provides a place to record machine setup times and issues, including detailed data on reasons for setup delay. This helps shorten setup times and improve setup consistency.
“A robust MES system provides the ability for comprehensive traceability from receipt of raw materials through production.”
PLEX.COM| 855.534.8012
Production Information Visibility is a Must
In addition to IT systems covering logistics and production tracking as noted above, a robust MES system must give a manufacturer visibility and management of ingredients, quality, scheduling, gauge tracking, and inventory management in order to track individual items or packaging supplies on the plant floor.
For example, full process traceability is critical to track everything from receipt of raw ingredients to shipment of finished goods and everything in between. An MES’s advanced features must automatically track the complete genealogy of all inventory containers, providing both an upstream and downstream trace, even in complex food and beverage manufacturing environments. You need this to track down and isolate all raw ingredients used in a defective lot or tracking down exactly who/what/when/where a defective item was produced.
Additional Communication Technology Needs
Other advanced technologies for plant floor control include integrated barcode printing and reading
capability for inventory, gage control, time and attendance, and user log-in cards.
Wireless networking, touch-screen functionality, integrated radio frequency identification (RFID), and automated notification capabilities are also key for plant floor control.
Controlling the Plant Floor is a Must
A modern, powerful, user-friendly MES is critical to meeting food and beverage manufacturing needs and enabling the end-to-end visibility required to run an effective, efficient enterprise. MES in the cloud inherently offers greater connectivity to a consolidated set of data from the entire enterprise. Cloud’s digital nature enables automated processes both within and upstream of production to ensure critical data is gathered and shared to operators, plant floor managers, and corporate for insights into continuous improvement opportunities. The tracking and analysis of ingredients and formulas, combined with greater automation and connectivity delivered by a modern MES offer greater quality management, business visibility, and ultimately control of the entire enterprise.
ABOUT PLEX
Plex Systems, Inc.® delivers the first smart manufacturing platform that empowers the world’s leading innovators to make awesome products. Plex gives process and discrete manufacturers the ability to connect, automate, track and analyze every aspect of their business -- from the shop floor to the top floor -- to drive business transformation. Built in the
cloud, the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform includes MES, ERP, supply chain management Industrial IoT, and analytics to connect people, systems, machines, and supply chains, enabling them to lead with precision, efficiency and agility in an ever-changing market. Learn more at www.plex.com
PLEX.COM| 855.534.8012
Featured Resources