When attendees to The Automation Conference 2013 attended Tom Braydich’s session, they learned how Campbell Soup Co. spent about 13 years using and optimizing an automated data collection and review system to create a centralized mobile workforce and decision support system that maximizes real-time visibility into the performance of manufacturing assets. Not every food and beverage manufacturer has the resources or the tenacity to build such a system exactly to their liking, but they have the same need for their manufacturing executives to gain greater visibility and intelligence from across their global operations.
Dassault Systèmes, through its DELMIA Apriso product portfolio, has released Global Visibility for Food & Beverage (F&B) manufacturers, a software solution for consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers to improve operational excellence.
“The complexity of managing a globally sourced supply chain, coupled with increasing pressure to provide new products with innovative packaging that is within regulatory compliance, is time-consuming and resource-intensive. And, with a zero tolerance for any potential quality issue, the potential cost of wasted product can be substantial,” says Gordon Benzie, spokesperson for Apriso and the blog-master responsible for the Manufacturing Transformation blog.
“The DELMIA Apriso team has been working with a couple of food manufacturers over the past 1-2 years,” Benzie says. “This experience has helped expand our industry knowledge and understanding of the unique challenges these manufactures experience, including the extreme traceability and packaging standards that must be adhered to with products that can often be quite perishable or harmful if not 100 percent accurate.”
Built on the Apriso Manufacturing Process Intelligence product suite, the new software ensures data can be collected and seen faster, and more accurately. It also includes a new Executive Intelligence Center dashboard application that delivers near real-time visibility of select key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to F&B manufacturers. Near-real-time visibility of data can better contain quality and compliance issues before they become major problems.
Rick Gallisa, DELMIA Apriso industry director at Dassault Systèmes, says that with this kind of manufacturing operations management (MOM) software, production information is provided to managers and executives in a role-based display that is contextualized and actionable—helping busy managers respond faster and more efficiently to operational challenges. This knowledge can be delivered directly to a decision maker’s desktop, smartphone, tablet or other mobile device.
Globalization has had “a tremendous impact on food and beverage manufacturing in terms of maintaining product quality, improving time-to-market for complex product introductions, and effectively synchronizing processes across a diverse supply chain,” says Gallisa. Use of the software “leads to better traceability effectiveness and packaging accuracy, in alignment with strategic business objectives.”
The current challenges faced by manufacturers can be seen in the recent recall of Kraft’s Oscar Meyer Wieners. A packaging problem led to the voluntary recall of 96,000 pounds of hot dogs across the U.S. in April. The Apriso software addresses such a problem, says Benzie.
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