Food Manufacturing recently corresponded with GE Digital's Katie Moore to discuss brilliant factory technologies and how these solutions and concepts can be of benefit to those in the food manufacturing industry.
Q. What are brilliant factory solutions? How are they used?
New levels of connectivity, powerful advanced computing, smarter sensors and devices, and industrial-grade cloud technologies mean more and more data is available. Related technology advancements like big data storage and predictive analytics are making it possible to obtain insights from this vast amount of data. This data availability and analytics capability is rapidly changing how industry designs, makes, and services its products.
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Brilliant Factory is GE’s commitment to use these latest technologies to consistently, and in real time, optimize its own operations. The Brilliant Manufacturing Suite is GE’s software solution to enable Brilliant Factories to optimize manufacturing performance. The Brilliant Manufacturing Suite represents a new approach to manufacturing software. It delivers a best of breed Efficiency Management solutions — honed by testing in GE’s own World-class factories. The Brilliant Manufacturing Suite leverages the Predix Cloud to speed deployments and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while providing a scalable solution designed for continuous improvement initiatives.
Q. What are the key benefits of leveraging brilliant factory technologies?
Ultimately, it is about employing a Digital Thread – seamlessly tying the flow of information from design through manufacturing to end consumers to include the full life cycle of the product. It’s about answering the question: how do we look at manufacturing and introduce data and analytics like never before? Manufacturing digitization is not a new concept, but the data today is stuck in silos. Brilliant manufacturing technologies enable food manufacturers to make better decisions using aggregated information and data from existing equipment and systems. Ideally, the future is moving from reactive, gut-based decisions to predictive, data-driven decisions.
Q. What is the “Digital Thread”?
The Digital Thread is a concept about creating a self-improving manufacturing ecosystem that allows all facets of the manufacturing supply chain to move faster and achieve new levels of productivity. The Digital Thread also integrates data throughout the supply chain from design to service, and it drives improvements in all aspects of a product, including the plant or factory that manufactures the product.
Q. Why are these concepts important to food manufacturing?
In the fast-paced, consumer-driven landscape of food and beverage processing, manufacturers must stay ahead in order to remain competitive and relevant. By employing a digital thread and leveraging brilliant manufacturing technologies, food and beverage manufacturers can deliver the right information, whether it is quality or operational data, to the people who need it, quickly and begin to break down the pre-existing data silos.
Q. How do manufacturing companies go about leveraging these technologies with no prior experience?
Determining a data collection strategy is paramount in starting down the path to leveraging these technologies. This data collection strategy must be anchored to one or two key outcomes that you as a food and beverage manufacturer are trying to deliver, possibly including: improving production efficiency, ensuring product quality or minimizing utility costs. In addition, a holistic team must be in place to ensure that the right stakeholders are involved from the beginning — operations, IT, quality, and maintenance. It is imperative that the overall future state remains top of mind. Often times, we see point-based solutions implemented that offer a quick win, but don’t necessarily fit into the long term strategy. It is critical for food and beverage manufacturers to find partners that offer more off-the-shelf solutions that are open and scalable to be able to build and grow with them.
Q. How will this change the way that food manufacturers operate?
Software technology is transforming the way food and beverage products are manufactured. Real-time, actionable information is delivering key insights that are allowing front line associates to make better, more informed decisions. Ultimately, this is enabling more reliable, efficient processing and improved product quality. Food and beverage manufacturing is being redefined by the digital thread, which will increase productivity gains well beyond what can be imagined today. Enabled by the Industrial Internet, software solutions allow companies to connect their equipment and systems to bring together disparate data for increased production visibility, leverage insights through advanced analytics, and achieve operational excellence for utmost productivity, quality, and sustainability.
Q. What impact will this have on the way consumers think about food?
Consumers already expect high quality and consistency in the brands that they purchase. Increasingly, consumers are asking for more transparency in ingredient nutrition labels and the origins of the raw materials and ingredients that go into their beloved products. For example, we have one dairy processor that is already providing their customers transparency in their supply chain by allowing consumers to track their milk products back to the farmer using the barcode printed on the finished package.
Q. What is your advice to manufacturers who want to be more proactive in terms of food safety to protect consumers and their brands?
While digitization is not a requirement as it relates to GFSI standards or FSMA regulations as examples, leading food and beverage manufacturers are adopting a digitization strategy to handle their food safety, quality and compliance programs. The food and beverage industry has the opportunity to take advantage of current software technologies that will put them on the path to true brilliant factory status. Brilliant manufacturing solutions can be used to collect and store data from every aspect of a production facility and then put insights into action to continually improve the food production process. The Digital Thread is the seamless flow of data across the food product’s lifecycle that can be captured, analyzed, and acted on. Only by establishing a holistic, integrated strategy, with the right set of software capabilities, can food manufacturers leverage the critical insight, consistency, and transparency needed to identify and address potential food safety issues while products are still within the manufacturing plant.
