World grain supply remains uncertain (still)
I’m sure you saw the news that the diplomatic agreement restarting Ukraine’s maritime exports ended in mid-November and has been extended for another 120 days. With food manufacturers suffering their biggest slowdown in 22 months, the ongoing uncertainty about grain supplies will hit them even harder. What’s more, the Eurozone’s manufacturing economy is already officially in a downturn.
If that wasn’t enough, the UK economy is now also in recession, meaning that consumer demand will keep falling and the PMI will likely keep falling with it. What manufacturers need right now is a strategy to minimise costs while also maximising output.
Smart technologies are one of the few levers manufacturers have left to pull to unlock hidden productivity. Let’s look at what this might mean practically for your organisation.
Harnessing your plant’s data
Manufacturers are sitting on mountains of untapped information. Each machine on their production lines is giving off thousands of tiny signals every day through vibration, temperature, and magnetic data.
Now experienced maintenance workers will know what to look out for when problems happen but it’s incredibly hard to be correct in your diagnosis every time and by the time an issue is caught; you might have already encountered hours of downtime and missed production targets due to lost efficiency.
Smart machine health technology captures machine data via IoT connectivity. It combines this information with advanced AI diagnostics and input from human-reliability experts, alerting users when a machine is going to fail, what to fix, and how to fix it. And the AI continually builds ‘knowledge’ and improves as it monitors the equipment.
By updating your technology infrastructure with AI-driven insights and continuous sensing, you can harness the mountains of data your plant produces and identify problems with almost 100% accuracy. Even better, you can detect problems before they even occur, avoiding downtime altogether.
Putting theory into practice
I’ve seen companies reduce their total energy consumption by as much as 20%, just by getting ahead of problems and eliminating downtime.
Looking at just one example, since 2020 Osem-Nestlé has been using machine health technology to avoid unexpected downtime. Recently one alert on their Sabra hummus production line allowed teams to make an early repair, saving thousands of dollars and preventing a shutdown of their entire factory.
Once you’ve eliminated unplanned downtime, collecting data on what impacts the quality of the products you produce will allow you to optimise your production process.
Knowing exactly what factors across your production line are affecting your throughput will also allow your plant to produce more good quality units per hour with a low cost per unit.
What’s more, this will help your organisation manage changing seasonal priorities without compromising on quality. For example, giving you the insights to intelligently prioritise throughput over Christmas and looking at lowering costs in the summer.
When it comes to raw materials, you’ll be able to see exactly what you need and when and become more adaptable to shifting client demands.
Doing innovation right
We’ve all worked on pilot projects that failed to take off and went nowhere.
When bringing new technology on board, setting specific goals for each site that are in line with actual business objectives is crucial. When these goals are achieved, you can work to maintain the momentum by measuring each success and sharing it with others while also establishing the next set of adoption goals.
You can continue to roll out technology at new plants while also considering their specific needs and objectives if adoption is successful at one or two sites. To involve stakeholders and make sure that employees adopt new technology as fast and effectively as possible, share the lessons learned as you grow and use internal and external champions to reach more facilities.
Unlocking hidden productivity
Food manufacturers can get ahead of ongoing uncertainty by acting now. They can increase productivity on their current production lines, decrease waste and emissions, and change the way their teams collaborate by effectively using machine health technologies. In these uncertain times, if nothing else manufacturers can trust their machines.
