9. Industry 4.0 in the Food and Beverage Sector?

According to Keith Thornhill – Head of Food and Beverage at Siemens Digital Industries, once a food manufacturer invests in some monitoring tools, that could enhance the production line, such as start to calculate almost immediately where productivity gains can be made, or where energy costs can be cut, or how the amount of downtime can be reduced through predictive maintenance, “the potential of digitalisation becomes clearer and more appealing”.

4.0 for Food and Beverage

Food and Beverage manufacturers that implement Industry 4.0, operate on two basic pillars:

  1. Information and process/product transparency
  2. Decentralized decision-making

Food manufacturers that implement 4.0 find their organisations are better equipped to control their processes. The effect this has to the company, is that there is more time to market their products, contribute to improving the global regulatory compliance, produce clean product labels with accurate, efficient ingredient management and more technologically responsive solutions to deliver maximum customer value at the lowest costs.

Managing, sharing and protecting data

Industry 4.0 directly impacts regulatory compliance for manufacturers who are in the Food and Beverage sector. Product data sharing, such as raw ingredients specifications and compliance-related information is now compulsory. In addition, 4.0 technology supports platforms that make the essential information available to shareholders throughout the supply chain.

Product data management is critical for global food and beverage manufacturers.

Infrastructure options such as Software as a services (SaaS) and Product lifecycle management in the cloud (Cloud PLM), are used for global supply chains in cyberspace. These are quickly becoming a key asset for manufacturers who operate across international borders and needed to comply with regulations while protecting data.

Food for thought

According to Severin J. Weiss – the CEO of SpecPage (global expert in integrated software process solutions for recipe-based food and beverage manufacturers), the food and beverage industry generates 1.8 trillion dollars per year worldwide. If Industry 4.0 replaced the older technologies, positive changes, including trends and consumer behaviours, global regulatory compliance and legal requirements as well as increasing specializations deliver unremitting challenges for food manufacturers. Digital networking of all processes can provide innovative solutions.

For the food and beverage sector, Industry 4.0 trends to identifying opportunities and implementing specific measures for best practices, by employing data to achieve a strategic, competitive advantage.

Tasks

Additional Task: https://h5p.org/node/730850