Miller Magazine Issue: 147 March 2022

70 COVER STORY MILLER / march 2022 rive value and benefit for clients by developing state- of-the-art digital solutions that can increase our custom- er’s production yield, improve their quality and cut their waste. The key point is you have to know what to do with the data.” Factory automation In addition to the real-time analysis of production parameters, automation is another key benefit of digi- talization to the food industry. Which is why Bühler has developed the Mercury Manufacturing Executive System (MES), a next generation factory automation platform. By automating a production process, it is possible to maintain premium quality by consistently controlling the exact composition of each raw material added to a prod- uct or by monitoring sorting criteria and efficiency to en- sure poor quality raw materials are stripped out and the end product is free of contamination. In a world where audits are a constant requirement, whether for food safety requirements or client quality controls, automation is able to monitor a process from end product to raw material, through second-by-second digital traceability, along with audit logs of each user in- teraction. “It is possible to access this traceability data with just three clicks,” explains Ruppert Gernot, Bühler Head of Business Development Customer Services. “In the field I have seen operators struggling with Ex- cel spread sheets or even using paper folders lying on tables when digital automation systems are able to re- duce the workload around traceability by 80 percent. In a world where the demand for audits is continually increasing, doing it manually can easily become over- whelming.” Digital automation also enables more accurate sam- pling and the ability to integrate data from different sources. An example is being able to digitally feed sales and customer orders into production parameters. BENEFITS OF DIGITALIZATION Digitalization means being able to eliminate the variables and unknowns that impact quality and efficiency by know- ing what is happening in real time at every point of your food production process. Digitally recording and analyzing production data makes it possible to see how parameters directly impact your end product. Comparisons can then be made with data sets from past production cycles to build a deeper understanding of how best to optimize outcomes with different qualities of raw materials. Being able to present customized data sets remote- ly, provides the kind of transparency that supports well informed collaborative decision making. Applying algo- rithms to your production cycle based on industry-wide data sets and analytics means always having the smart- est operators in charge of your production process all day, every day. Companies are discovering new benefits to digitalization daily but there are some challenges cur- rently being faced by food producers that digital solu- tions are ideally placed to address. These include: Skill shortages Some sectors of the food industry, such as milling, are currently experiencing severe skill shortages. It is only through years of learnt experience that a master miller will acquire the skills to improve processes and efficien- cy. But the industry is struggling to recruit the next gen- eration of master millers as young employees shy away from the challenging work conditions of the traditional mill. Without digital solutions this skill shortfall is set to become a major challenge for producers. Profitability Anyone working in the food sector knows how com- petitive it is. As competition increases so profit margins are driven down requiring every aspect of the produc- tion process to be run at optimum performance. It is only through digital automation that this optimization of pro- duction standards can be achieved. Traceability Consumers are becoming ever-more demanding about the provenance of their food and want to know that it has been produced sustainably and to ethical stan- dard. Demands on food producers around food safety standards are also becoming more rigorous requiring a level of auditing and traceability that is becoming difficult to achieve outside a digital framework. Machine integrity One challenge for all food producers is how to best avoid production down time caused by machine mainte- nance. By digitally monitoring key machine performance indicators it becomes possible to see trends in equip- ment effectiveness, energy consumption, down times as well an interpreting, recording and analyzing incidents that cause production losses. By building up a digital picture of machine performance it is easier to anticipate problems before they arise and schedule maintenance when it is least disruptive. Digitalization supports sustainability In October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli- mate Change (IPCC) warned we have until 2030 to curb