Companies in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Food and Beverage industries looking to improve quality and compliance need modern, digital solutions that fit with their operating requirements and can evolve with their needs. A priority for these companies is greater visibility and real-time insight that can help improve quality and compliance.
Key business challenges for these manufacturers include how well their manufacturing operations will address customer expectations for new products including “farm to fork” trends, be resilient in the face of supply chain disruptions, handle labor shortages and comply with sustainability regulations.
- Do your operations keep up with increasingly stringent food and health safety regulations? For example, do you have a traceability plan in place for the new regulations in Food Safety Modernization Act Section 204? This new rule requires the ability to maintain records containing key data elements for critical tracking events along the lifecycle of a food product.
- What’s your tolerance for downtime? Do you run high volume, highly automated manufacturing, do you run near 24/7? Do you need your manufacturing operations to run without connection to the internet or in the case if IT systems are compromised, can you keep OT running for business continuity if required?
- Is quality an issue? Do you need to deliver more consistent product quality regardless of location, shift, or equipment? Do you need to better manage quality in the context of supply change challenges on ingredients or while managing a high demand for changing products?
How do you know if an edge or cloud MES solution is right for your organization?
Cloud and Edge MES have different value propositions:
- Cloud systems typically reduce initial infrastructure and capital costs as well as lower maintenance and localized support requirements.
- Edge-based systems offer more control and are better suited to integrate into other edge systems as is typically required in highly automated manufacturing environments.
The right MES will reduce waste and rework with greater first-pass quality, guided by business process-driven workflows and integrations that will help prevent the release of poor-quality products with no-fault forward systems that provide instantaneous results.
How close to the edge should you be?
The CPG manufacturing industry already leverages significant amounts of automation, but the future of manufacturing is driving towards larger factories with more automation tending and towards autonomous manufacturing operations. Lights out manufacturing is a methodology that uses fully automated technology to run manufacturing operations with little or no human intervention and requires the integration of OT systems to collection high-frequency data and the support of multiple technologies such as machine learning.
Lights out manufacturing leans toward MES on the edge because high automation with extensive control system aspects requires lower latency of data movement and reading and writing between systems with less human interaction. A cloud solution is more focused on passing information back and forth transactionally and less inclined to focus on high automation control system integration.
Consider MES at the edge if you need greater:
- Security - Organizations often feel they can provide better cyber security protection and isolation to on edge systems compared to relying on a cloud system.
- Data IP protection - Many companies don’t trust having their competitive differentiators, like recipes, in the cloud.
- Availability - When there’s no global window for a shutdown, the edge is the answer and gives more control.
- Data sovereignty - Many countries have laws and regulations that dictate where data can reside and who can access that data, in particular relevant to personal data.
Functionally, MES in the cloud and MES on the edge can do the similar things. Your non-functional requirements (NFR) will populate your pro/con list, including your level of automation, types of processes (batch versus continuous), availability, line speed and throughput expectations. Such NFRs can help your organization decide whether a cloud, edge or potentially a hybrid MES solution is the right choice for you.
