Making the difference in food and beverage
The ability to graphically interact with and explore data is essential to food and beverage producers, especially because they suffer from the same data quality and relevance issues prevalent across the manufacturing industry.
Whatever problem you’re trying to solve, you will need to explore and filter data to focus on what’s relevant while removing bad data from your sample. If you are studying time needed to clean equipment, for instance, clean-in-place (CIP) data may be relevant, but if you are studying what processing changes extend necessary CIP cleaning time, processing data is relevant.
With a better idea of what challenge to solve, you can then better use technology like MPC. With a focus on throughput and ingredient yields, a significant change on one portion of the line often requires multiple adjustments over time downstream. In these situations, MPC helps coordinate and facilitate adjustments by anticipating when changes will appropriately maintain the final product quality.
For example, interacting with data can help someone in the facility identify the blanchers, driers, fryers and other units on a french fry line as a problem area that would benefit from MPC. By enforcing the line’s constraints, employees can ensure a plant is producing the most fries possible without sacrificing quality or tripping sections of the line.
MPC coordinates sections of the plant, such as unit temperatures, to eliminate disturbance impacts, even as throughput or raw potato quality changes. Other disturbances could include steam pressure or refrigerant temperature, which MPC can sense, and then leverage its model on fry quality to make appropriate corrections.
Where to start with exploring your data
Before exploring and learning from data, users need to filter and clean information. By removing irrelevant outliers and unusual conditions through filters, users can focus on what’s most important to each line and challenge.
Bundling all these capabilities together streamlines data exploration and the process of seeking solutions. And now, Rockwell Automation is releasing the FactoryTalk® Analytics™ Data Explorer solution to do just that.
Data Explorer is targeted to release near the end of March 2019. At that time, we’ll offer a free 60-day trial, so you can confirm the technology provides the expected value for your operations.
