The Role of Production Monitoring in Food & Beverage: Unlocking Efficiency Through Real-Time Data Analysis

There’s no question – food and beverage manufacturing is changing rapidly. With the rise of Industry 4.0, the new buzzword on everyone’s mind is “big data“. But, what do you do with it, and how does it apply to the food manufacturers, beverage manufacturers, or even pet food manufacturers?

Each food and beverage manufacturer has unique safety, regulatory, and customer requirements that must be fulfilled. Tracking those requirements accurately, and in real-time, provides the biggest benefit for meeting standards and continuous improvement. Good data management is now essential for accurately tracking and linking all products to a specific source or batch.

In the food processing industry, quality, yield, headcount, labor units per hour, and units per hour produced are all important metrics. Food and beverage software can help provide actionable insights into the production process and help to ensure all standards, including quality and yield, are met.

Many regulations require exact data about the production of food, beverage, and pet food products, and if you consider the amount of product produced on a daily basis, it can get very complicated quickly. It’s important for manufacturers to have precise data and understanding of the product being manufactured. The solution is data analytics and management.

Manufacturers have long relied on data collection through manual means – a person watching the machine to measure cycle time, calculating OEE offline, and reporting data through manually created excel spreadsheets. Those manual processes have not changed throughout the years, but as big data becomes widely adopted, data collection will need to be modernized, too. These processes will need to be automated. Not only does automation reduce mistakes and time spent on non-value-added tasks, but it increases understanding of what’s happening, in real-time. With food and beverage software, real visibility on the plant floor is possible.

There are a couple of examples of manufacturing productivity software in use that may help persuade you of the benefits.

Example 1: Consider the implications of a filler being faster than a capper. Track not only what is on the line of an accumulator table, but each station. You will be able to understand where the bottlenecks are and how they move around. Process technologies and packaging can become more efficient.

Example 2: The software can connect to the check weighers to not only count how much product is produced but if any product was rejected for being under or overweight. Gain insights by gathering the weight data into the software and look at trends over time to see if there is a problem with the filler.

Example 3: Many people are needed to assist on the production lines. With Mingo, you can track how many people are on the line at any given time, calculate output per person, and determine labor efficiency per person. The data can help you figure out the optimized number of people for any line, and how being short-staffed will affect production.

Choosing a software solution to help you increase efficiencies and improve productivity in the plant is a very unique process. You have goals you need to achieve and deadlines to meet so whichever software you choose, has to help you do that. While we encourage you to explore everything Mingo has to offer, you need to have an idea of what you want to accomplish before actually selecting software.

There are particular questions you need to consider before moving forward. What is your price point? Does the software fit within your budget? What is the implementation process like? Do you need someone to spearhead the project or will the company handle that? Specifically, how will it help you achieve your goals? Have they worked with manufacturers in your industry before? While these are only a few examples, there’s a lot of research that needs to be done before signing on the dotted line.

However, Mingo can provide visibility to the following industries: food, beverage, including soda or soft drinks, bottled water, pet food, breweries, etc. Mingo’s focus is not limited to one particular industry but can be applied to virtually any food manufacturing or beverage manufacturing industry. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team of manufacturing experts. We’re happy to help.

Look closely at is exactly why you were able to increase OEE. If you fully understand the mechanisms behind the increase you can determine if improvements are permanent, seasonal, or part of a larger, more complex process, etc. Knowing this information could help you make improvements in other parts of your business.

Yes, we have a mobile app designed to give you insight into the plant, even when you’re not there. Get completely configurable real-time alerts that help you understand what’s happening. Get notified, and escalate the issue as needed, when a machine is down or scrap is too higher. Alerts can be customized to the metrics you care about.

Mingo also has the capability to send manufacturing insights emails to provide automatic reporting. Summarizing the end of the shift, end of the day, or end of the week numbers, these emails eliminate the need for manual, tedious reporting. Additionally, scoreboards throughout the plant provide visibility at a glance, telling operators and managers alike, if they’re ahead or behind the target. Operator screens on machines, stations, or lines help operators know how they’re performing at any given moment.