Staying ahead in the production efficiency race

Competing in this environment means balancing the conflict between product quality, flexibility and cost control to achieve business profitability.

It requires real-time, adaptive business decision making while managing risks.

Instant answers to key manufacturing questions are required:

• Is the product quality consistently good?
• Can product ingredients be documented?
• How much profit was made today on each product line?
• Which products generate the best margin?
• How can profitability be improved?

In reality information is often late, inaccurate or not available at all. Fortunately, APV can help customers manage the challenge to stay ahead.

As a supplier of plant and components for over 100 years, APV® has in-depth understanding of process technology. In response to customer needs, the company has combined this process know-how with revolutionary automation and information technology.

The result is a scalable set of highly functional solutions that address key business drivers and enable food manufacturers to use all their existing resources to their maximum potential.

These solutions provide the necessary information to run process plant facilities profitably, smoothly and in compliance with legislative regulations.Better information results in better analysis and control, better quality and better profit.

In this issue of Food & Drink, APV™s automation capabilities are highlighted in a series of articles, which drill down from this overview into more detailed information on automation technology and functional automation solutions to customer case stories.

The business drivers

Regulatory Compliance, Product Safety and Quality

As an issue for governments, supermarket chains and manufacturers across the world, food safety is always in the news.

Amid growing concerns about the safety of our food, the cornerstone of today™s strategy for all food manufacturers is managing quality. Continuous investment in compliance and inspection ensures that quality management is instilled in every step of the production process. A system for tracking and tracing is essential. New legislative requirements from the European Parliament (Regulation No 178/2002) as well as the Bioterrorism Response Act in the United States require that food companies account for every link in their supply chain. After the regulations go into effect, food companies and manufacturers will have to maintain records for each batch of food. Consumers and supermarket chains will further force the issue for manufacturers.

While it is possible to keep these records on paper and still meet regulatory requirements, the challenge will be to provide a large amount of specific, detailed information in a very short time-frame.

APV® has successfully applied tracking and tracing solutions for food manufacturers for several years and has closely researched the requirements associated with the new regulations.

The result is a solution set around the new revolutionary ArchestrA® technology. This provides scalability from equipment traceability in a process cell to a full integration of traceability within the business systems and the supply chain.

In addition to complying with regulatory requirements APV™s Automation solutions can help to improve:-

Plant Performance

Traceability tools can also be used to provide mass balances, reduce production losses and track downtime.

A key pre-requisite to improve plant performance is structured and reliable data with sufficient granularity to understand the cost and profit potential at the operational level. Traditionally, data sources in food manufacturing plants are fragmented and do not provide the necessary quality of information. It is therefore difficult to encourage employees to use this data because they often do not have sufficient confidence in its integrity.

The new APV Production Server, (further details provided on page 6-7), which is built on the ArchestrA® infrastructure, helps to change this behaviour. Its combination of process know-how and structured data integration transforms fragmented data into real-time plant intelligence, enabling continuous plant performance analysis.

The results are improved plant performance and quality. It also fosters a culture of continued improvement that will sustain high-efficiency plant performance.

Flexibility, Time to Market and Collaborative Manufacturing

Food manufacturing sites and requirements vary to a great extent. In some cases there is a demand for smaller production batches with faster, more frequent delivery of a wider range of products, increasing the need for manufacturing agility.

Conversely, for some manufacturers, there may be a need for lowest cost manufacturing of high volumes of end products at low margins. Both scenarios need transparent views on cost structures to support the right business decisions.

The data that would be instrumental in finding answers to these questions is often difficult to obtain. This is because most plants have equipment sourced from different suppliers with different control systems programmed with different methodologies and languages. Although control systems have been networked, it has often proved difficult to integrate them into a collaborative manufacturing environment with, for example, a common nomenclature.

Rather than standardising on a single control system, APV™s automation strategy is built around the innovative Invensys ArchestrA® architecture (for further details see page 4-5).

APV utilises the Industrial Application Server from Wonderware®, which incorporates the Invensys ArchestrA® software architecture. This forms a neutral layer between the control systems, the ArchestrA® environment and collaborative production extensions, for example, to the transactional Production Management and ERP systems.

By applying these architectures, APV supports the ISA S88 Batch standard for flexibility on recipe selection and creation. The system has also proved to be very operator friendly.

The ISA S95 standard is used to increase information visibility by synchronising and managing business and production processes. Typical results are:

• Improved efficiency of business and production processes
• Reduced time to market of new products
• Fast internal communication and increased flexibility
• Transparent views on cost structures

The case stories later in this issue about Brouwerij Martens and Pernod explain how customers can profit from collaborative production and manufacturing processes built around Invensys solutions.

The technology provided by the ArchestrA® infrastructure and the plant performance improvements achieved through the APV Production Server pave the way for further domain specific productivity packages from APV. These will be available in the near future to help our customers stay ahead of the production efficiency race.