Since their birth in the 1980s, manufacturing execution systems (MES) have played a critical role in manufacturing operations across most industries. Rockwell Automation’s platform Plex is helping food and beverage companies shift their systems to the cloud.
The development of cloud computing has sparked a massive transformation across industries and businesses, with manufacturing industries increasingly moving their systems to the cloud.
regional director – South Pacific.
(Image: Rockwell Automation)
One of the companies enabling this transformation is Plex, a SaaS manufacturing platform that includes MES, quality, and supply chain management capabilities.
Rockwell Automation, one of the world’s largest companies dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, acquired Plex last year.
Rockwell Automation’s regional director – South Pacific, Anthony Wong, says bringing Plex into the company has allowed it to optimise customers’ operations and bring smart manufacturing to life.
Wong uses the example of the production whiteboard, a common sight on shopfloors, as a system helped by digital transformation. Being manual, these whiteboards are prone to human error and can become outdated very quickly.
In contrast, Plex Production Monitoring allows users to set up and leverage dashboards and scoreboards to display real-time production measures including cycle times, capacity utilisation, and overall equipment effectiveness.
“This is when production monitoring stops being just a process and becomes the swiss army knife that gets you to your goals,” says Wong.
Typically, different teams within manufacturing processes worked in silos, making information sharing slow and error prone. It is difficult for teams to access accurate and reliable data on things such as inventory levels and expiration dates, which are especially crucial in the food and beverage industry.
Increasingly, consumers care about what they eat, how their food is produced, and the impact that food production and consumption have on the environment and society. Food safety is also an ongoing concern.
That means ingredient traceability is essential. Australia has stringent rules that continue to grow increasingly complex with food manufacturers being held to greater accountability. FSANZ specifies the “one step back and one step forward” rule for traceability and manufacturers must be aware of the source of all their ingredients and maintain detailed records.
According to the US Consumer Brands Association, the estimated average cost for a food recall in the US is US$10 million, covering direct costs such as the retrieval and disposal of the tainted product, lost sales and brand damage.
Easy roll-out
Ease of implementation is a key consideration for companies considering manufacturing solutions. When Ohio-based liquid goods manufacturer Dominion Liquid Technologies (DLT) acquired a specialty coffee syrup manufacturer, the company knew it would face significant challenges to make the new entity successful.
DLT’s priorities were clear: improve traceability, quality, and inventory control capabilities without major capital investment.
The company wanted a nimble system that would deliver end-to-end traceability without having to invest in a huge IT infrastructure.
DLT implemented Plex Manufacturing Cloud in six months, enabling the company to achieve an inventory accuracy of nearly 100 per cent. The management team was also able to evaluate downtime, line productivity, and identify different kinds of scrap that delivered significant margin improvement.
“In some cases, Plex has increased inventory turnaround by two times, creating savings that can fund new initiatives,” says Wong.
Industry impact
There are lessons for the country’s food manufacturing sector. According to the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC), Australia’s food and grocery manufacturing sector is under pressure from declining profitability, partly due to stagnant capital investment and low innovation.
Food is the largest manufacturing sector in Australia and identified a priority industry for the country, expected to grow to $230 billion by 2030. The next biggest sector is primary metal manufacturing, which has an annual turnover less than half that of food and grocery.
Growth can be particularly challenging because it is a margin-constrained business impacted by economic conditions, weather, and skills availability.
Wong says this is where Plex can make a real difference, delivering value to manufacturers in high-volume, highly repetitive processes while helping them comply with regulatory requirements and meet consumer expectations in areas like product quality, safety, and sustainability.
The AFGC called out the sector for its declining productivity growth caused by the lack of investment in the latest production technologies.
A 2021 report by the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology found, “The industry is falling behind the efficient production frontier compounding the weakened competitive position.”
Scalable, modular solution
The good news is that solutions exist and can be quickly implemented. Plex, for instance, does not require major investment in hardware or IT infrastructure. “Plex is modular and scalable – it grows with you,” says Wong.
“Using Plex for food and beverage manufacturers and processors is like moving from DVDs to a streaming service. It opens up these technologies to smaller players, because they don’t have to invest in large up-front costs.
“You can select the components you need – such as a quality management system (QMS) or monitoring and can evolve to a full MES later. It works for a business of any size, any amount, any scale. The software grows with you, including the pricing,” says Wong.
“New functionality is constantly being added, and because it’s a modular system, it doesn’t take everything else offline to perform an update,” says Wong.
He adds that being cloud-based makes software like Plex easy to keep updated with customer-driven features.
