Category: Food Industry

Documenting Your Manufacturing Ecosystem

Understanding your manufacturing ecosystem is one thing, but documenting it is just as important. Having extensive documentation of the manufacturing ecosystem, helps those who aren’t involved in daily, plant-floor operations make informed decisions. Your manufacturing ecosystem is the system you use for making your product(s), and fully documenting and understanding this ecosystem will help the Full Story

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The Benefits of Off-The-Shelf SOP Management Software

Being able to keep track of every step and every bit of data is a major necessity for every organization. An off-the-shelf standard operating procedure software is one way to implement new processes and keep track of business operating standards. Tracking manual operations in discrete, batch, and continuous manufacturing processes can greatly benefit from off-the-shelf Full Story

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The Importance of Material Tracing

Traceability on a processing or production line is incredibly important, especially when it comes to food products, where having the ability to track every ingredient down to the source is crucial to the health and safety of the consumers. As parts of the country begin to move out of COVID-19 shutdowns, we have been hearing Full Story

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Leveraging ISA-88 Standards for Discrete Manufacturing

Tracking manual discrete manufacturing processes can greatly benefit from off-the-shelf products. Often, discrete manufacturing processes requiring a high level of manual operator activities that rely on paper-based Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to specify how to manufacture their products. Operators are responsible to perform the tasks as specified by the SOP as well as capturing the Full Story

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Material Dosing Geneology

The Food industry uses batch manufacturing extensively and therefore requires traceability for material ingredients, i.e. the ability to follow the movement of a food product and its’ constituents all through the production process. This capability not only largely prevents unsafe foods from reaching the consumer but also improves product quality and efficiency in the event Full Story

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Securing your Intellectual Property

Production procedures and formula values property How secure is the intellectual property of your products? Many degrees of automation exist in manufacturing plants, but they all have a common requirement– specifying the activities and the order in which they need to occur as well as the key setpoints such as materials, amounts, tolerances, temperatures, durations, Full Story

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Improve Cooking Quality Utilizing the Lethality Factor Principles

Cooking (thermal processing) is critically important for controlling the levels of foodborne pathogens in products. Cooking is an effective process for eliminating, or at least reducing to acceptable levels, any pathogenic bacteria that may be present in the products. Today thermal processing is applied to literally hundreds of types of manufacturing processes from hams to Full Story

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Dosing Materials Based On Their Properties

Improving Product Quality Often the quantities of materials required to manufacture a product are specified by weight or by volume. Recipes and procedures are created to specify the activities that need to be performed and the number of materials required. The Setpoints for these quantities are set in the recipes based on the materials that Full Story

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Materials and Lot ID Traceability

In the event of a recall can you find everything you need to know in an expeditious way. As per Wikipedia, “Traceability” is the capability to trace something. In some cases, it is interpreted as the ability to verify the history, location, or application of an item by means of documented recorded identification. In the Full Story

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Automated Procedures for Manual Processes

Process customers do not need to automate their equipment to start taking advantage of some of the important benefits that off-the-shelf automation products possess. Processes that are typically operated manually can benefit from automating their procedural execution, meaning that the activities that operator typically perform by following printed Standard Operating Procedures can be Specified, Enforced, Full Story

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