This is a sponsored post by Rockwell Automation
Food and beverage (F&B) manufacturers are acutely aware of the need to comply with food quality and safety requirements to maintain brand integrity and build customer loyalty.
Moreover, F&B manufacturers have a responsibility to ensure products are safe for human consumption, and clearly indicate accurate allergy information for those where a single ingredient can have adverse effects, says Rockwell Automation food and beverage industry manager Glen Jacob. Rockwell Automation is the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation.
However, the day-to-day requirements can often be a time-consuming process, full of filling out all kinds of paper-based forms, with no top-down view of compliance practices.
Embracing digital technology
To revolutionise the efficiency of F&B compliance practices, digital technologies need to replace paper processes.
“F&B manufacturers can benefit from embracing the digitalisation of auditing and compliance practices,” Jacob says.
A digital quality management system (QMS) can provide features like real-time tracking, notifications, and reporting to create a paperless and proactive process.
“Another major benefit of digital QMS is that documentation can be shared in real-time from top floor to plant floor, from supplier to customer, through a cloud platform,” says Jacob, who has more than 25 years’ experience helping F&B processors make their manufacturing operations more productive by applying automation and Operational Technology/ Information Technology (OT/IT) solutions.
Having the right data on hand can also help in product recall scenarios. According to Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ), between 2011 and 2020, there were 763 recalls, including 109 recalls in 2020.
“People understand that even for companies taking all the right precautions, product recalls can happen. What’s important, from a manufacturer point of view, is to have all the data necessary to rapidly react to recalls and protect the company reputation – and that’s where a digital QMS is highly valuable,” says Jacob.
Webinar: Achieving audits in minutes, not days
To help F&B manufacturers digitalise their compliance programmes, Rockwell Automation is hosting a webinar on 19 May (11am AEST) titled Food and Safety Compliance: How to achieve audits in minutes not days.
The webinar will discuss Rockwell Automation’s Plex smart manufacturing platform, which includes a QMS designed to offer a modern, digital system that provides full control and visibility of operations within a single system.
“The Plex smart manufacturing platform can provide an integrated manufacturing execution system (MES), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) solution, or it can provide a MES that integrates directly with an established ERP system. It’s designed to scale up digitalisation in whichever way suits an organisation’s current operations best.
“With constant monitoring and real-time reporting, audits can be completed in minutes, not days, taking away downtime and hassle, so F&B manufacturers can focus on production,” Jacob says.
Register for the Rockwell Automation Food Safety and Compliance webinar here.
