Protecting the Food We Eat

Another business trend now influencing food manufacturers is a new level of awareness that being able to provide accurate, timely, and complete product traceability includes the ability to collect and relate product formulation and operational processing standards. This includes collecting actual information about production results in every aspect of the manufacturing process—not just about the movement of ingredients, intermediates, and finished products from inventory or to suppliers, distributors, and customers.

Manufacturers realize that having an audit trail that provides information on ingredient, intermediate, and product movement through inventory—as well as the manufacturing process activity—requires standardized and automated interaction in real-time between point-of-action plant personnel and business systems.

Further, standardized best practices that also support product traceability must be repeatable, scalable, and transferable in order to produce products of consistent quality that can be audited. The ability to audit is now based on ingredient inputs and the use of specified plant equipment flowing through detailed processing operations and value-add operator activities that also include quality sampling, electronic signatures, and recorded quality test results.

Need for Detailed, Real-Time Information

For food manufacturers, inherent complexity and variability introduce another level of granularity when defining manufacturing processes by product and production line. It is necessary to collect detailed information in a timely manner during processing and to provide the right level of performance metrics, actionable information, and control.

Manufacturing execution systems can meet requirements and monitor capital equipment performance but cannot evaluate or respond to multiple performance metrics in the way operations personnel can. Such decisions are often based on concurrent data points, such as quality sampling and testing, quantity rates and throughput, equipment performance, and especially changes in demand and supply availability or specialized operator scheduling and activities.

This means that enterprise business systems need to move from product lots into another level of production performance results. For complete support of product-lot traceability to be effective, process performance information must be collected at the point of action by production operators. This will provide information on how a product was manufactured. It will also reveal the production line and process used, associating each activity with a specific date and time.

The primary goals of enterprise business systems that automate process instructions and activity reporting on the plant production floor are to ensure consistent decisions and actions and to capture these results in real time, making them visible as part of the enterprise business system.

But the hidden—and equally important—benefit lies in making action unavoidable during production and processing while also capturing real-time information about each product and process. This provides an added dimension of product traceability.

Empower Production Operators

An additional element of managing production involves empowering production operators with the necessary tools, information, and flexibility to make adjustments without the loss of critical capacity that can occur while an operator seeks supervisor or managerial review.

Setting clear and controllable parameters around resolving conditions, such as substituting ingredients, formulating corrections, fine-tuning processing equipment to meet the Original Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) standards, and automating the ability to take corrective action as part of inline processing further enhances a manufacturer’s ability to deliver quality measurements and reporting. These are critical for accessing the history of each traceable product lot.

The combination of all of these automated pro duct and process standards and the collection of real-time information about production processing, inventory movement, quality testing, and operator accountability supports manufacturers effectively using a consistent production process with high quality delivery and product lot traceability. This next generation of business automation is already delivering a new level of control and performance in support of improved product traceability for today’s food companies.