How Food Manufacturers Can Benefit from Going Paperless

The IIoT also provides food manufacturers the opportunity to connect with consumers in ways that can help transform their businesses. As food manufacturers continue to face increasing pressure from both regulators and consumers, they need to be nimbler than ever before. By extracting and leveraging intelligence from across the supply and demand chain, the IIoT will be at the forefront to assist food manufacturers facing these challenges of the ever-accelerating speed of the food industry.

Creating a Smart Supply and Demand Chain

Most consumers are already familiar with the power and potential of the IoT to help make their lives easier. In the food industry, consumers can now purchase refrigerators with IoT capabilities that enable them to view their home food “inventory” from anywhere via their smartphone. This connectivity can then be extended to their preferred grocery vendor, which in turn is integrated with food suppliers and manufacturers. This connectivity allows consumer demand to be monitored and analyzed unlike ever before, giving parties at each step in the supply and demand chain insight that can increase their efficiency and potential profitability. Integrating this information and adapting to automated systems enables companies to build a truly intelligent enterprise that will make production and inventory decisions with little or no human intervention.

The IIoT will make food manufacturers more flexible and agile in responding to market shifts. As people integrate more intelligent devices into their lives, more data about consumer demand can be aggregated and shared directly with supply chain systems to better inform them about product preferences. The impact this will have on the manufacturer’s production, materials, and distribution planning would be immense and ensure the right product gets to the right places at the right time, all while eliminating unnecessary warehousing, refrigeration, transportation, and inventory costs.

Making the Transition

How do manufacturers continue this journey to become paperless? The good news is the cost of connecting devices in the manufacturing process is decreasing, which means so are the reasons for retaining manual processes.

However, while the IIoT promises revolutionary improvements for quality and efficiency, achieving its full potential will likely be an evolutionary process for most food manufacturers. It’s not realistic to think in terms of a comprehensive “all or nothing” implementation. Instead, manufacturers can use IIoT technologies to connect and complement existing automation systems. For example, the first steps could be minimizing manual and paper-based processes, or delivering new insights and instructions via real-time data to operators’ mobile devices to guide their work. As the apparent value of IIoT continues to become grow, manufacturers can add new capabilities that extend data collection, organization, and analysis as they move toward completing a truly “smart” supply and demand chain.

Ensuring Availability

Of course, as the role of electronic data grows, so does its importance. Indeed, concern about the reliance of electronic data systems causes some manufacturers to hold on to paper as a last resort or “backup.” However, relying on paper solely for this purpose actually limits the enterprise, preventing it from its full potential to transform the way business is done.

Instead, manufacturers need to make continuous availability a top priority as they migrate to paperless systems and increased connectivity. High-availability, fault-tolerant systems are critical in preventing any disruption in the data stream that could lead to production downtime or missing data.

In addition, as intelligence moves out to the network edge, such as with in-line quality analysis, implementing technology that ensures these systems can be serviced easily is equally important for minimizing operating costs and complexity. With operational technology teams running lean, the ability to perform remote servicing of production systems is crucial.

Measuring ROI

Narrow margins and intense competition make rapid return on investment a vital component when implementing these technological changes. Few industries are more focused on ROI than food manufacturing. So what’s the ultimate payback of “going paperless” and adopting the IIoT? The greatest return may be in helping avoid the pitfall of having to issue a recall. By enabling manufacturers to perform in-line, real-time quality analysis, as well as detailed track and trace, the IIoT can protect an enterprise from a food quality or safety issue that could prove catastrophic to brand integrity and reputation.