The Smart Meat Factory is coming. Recent new build have shown the dimension of the change, and how much meat facilities are improved through digitisation.
If you are building a new or extending an existing factory, there are a few things you should observe to get maximum benefits out of your new build and to plan it in a future-proof manner.
Planning the meat factory of the future
One important factor is the sales market. Your customers are demanding. They call for permanent supply capability while keeping response times as short as possible. Disruptions in production or planning deficits are difficult to compensate in the day-to-day business. Another factor is the traceability of products and processes, the importance of which today can hardly be overrated: after all, trade, consumers and also you want to see the data.
The good news is that key technologies on the road to the Smart Meat Factory by now have been tried and tested, and that they are by far not as expensive as they used to be. The third and crucial factor is the production as such. While complexity and cost pressure are increasing, production should become more flexible and efficient. The smart technologies of Industrial Internet of the Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 bring large benefits for the meat industry.
In this white paper, we will point out how you can make your new building even better while assuring future sustainability. Of course, you can follow these tips not only in the ideal case of greenfield projects, but also for extensions.
The meat industry is digitising
When slaughterhouses and cutting facilities manufacture sausage s, semi-finished products, minced meat or other meat products from red or white meat, there is always one thing they have in common: Today, management of the value-adding processes and networks is unthinkable without digitisation. Digital tools are used at all stations – from the entry of the animals’ chips and the ERP as the central nervous system of the meat factory, to quality control and delivery of the finished products to the consumers. Furthermore, digitisation in this industry is of significant relevance when it comes to sustainability, product innovations and responsiveness in the competition. If you tackle the new construction of a greenfield meat processing facility, you must take into account the complex interrelation of technologies, process innovations and consumer wishers.
IT is at the heart of the Smart Meat Factory
New builds have thus become genuine IT projects. Which is a major change compared to the past, when you took care of the architecture and the hardware, and the IT system was mounted only in the end. Of course, this does not really work for the Smart Meat Factory, as we have learned in the past few years in many new-build projects in the meat industry that we have supported as technology vendors. With the following seven factors of success, we will point out what we believe you should observe in particular.
Success Factor No 1:
Start with the management cockpit
You only get a firm grip on your new factory if you are able to measure and control it. This is why the data-based management cockpit is the most important element of the Smart Meat Factory. With the right, accurate and up-to-date measures, indicators and KPI, you will be able to monitor the performance, to identify problems and to intervene systematically in order to further optimise the factory. In addition to your individual business key data, you should therefore have permanent access to the following areas in order to control your factory in an optimal manner
Receiving
Provide a possibility to check the goods directly in receiving and to document the result in a software system. This will help you with the assessment of your suppliers and with the proper processing of the goods in your factory. After all, you work with natural products that never have a standardised quality.
Production and intralogistics
Machines must be reliably with as little downtime as possible. This is imperative for your factories to achieve the production volumes you are aiming at. One important measure in this context is OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). In today’s competition, this is one of the most important production indicators as it measures the efficiency of machines, equipment or entire departments, giving an early warning of a machine downtime. This results in a better performance of the value-adding departments, shorter downtimes and significantly fewer rejects and missing quantities.
Stock on hand
Keeping track of the stock on hand is a must-have capability for Smart Factories. This is particularly true for the meat industry where it is the quality and the freshness of the products that count. If you combine intelligent stock on hand monitoring with a reliable forecast of market demands, you can prevent excess stock as well as stock shortfalls and calculate the optimal order quantities. When the minimum stocks are reached in the raw materials or dispatch warehouses, messages will be issued automatically. In this way, you can achieve one hundred percent coverage of the material requirements while keeping the capital commitment as low as possible.
Gross margin
Ultimately, you want to make money with your new building. For this, you need hard facts like gross margins, pre-calculation and post-calculation, sales figures per product, customer or country. You can respond better to the developments in the raw material markets, for example in case of increasing slaughter prices for pigs and cattle. Digital solutions can help you here to control the margins in the best possible manner.
Success Factor No. 2:
Establish a consistent data flow
Data is the essential raw material of the Smart Factory. What you cannot capture, you can neither control nor improve. Or it would take you a lot of work to do so. Consequently, you should optimise the data management. The required traceability provides the basis that helps to define the data entry points.
Labeling and identification
Barcodes, RFID chips, sensors and image recognition provide a good overview and ensure seamless documentation. For instance, when the meat cuts obtained in the slaughter and cutting processes are distributed to crates and boxes labelled with GS1 barcodes, the ERP system would be informed about the key indicators right from the filling stage. To ensure full traceability at all times, the data is trailed electronically from one processing step to the next: From receiving to production and packaging, and to picking and dispatch.
Communication between hardware, software and people
By using new technologies, software, hardware and people work together much more efficiently. As the most “natural” interface in man-machine communication, speech-based technologies help to overcome many obstacles. What works very well in the use of Alexa or Siri can considerably simplify the work processes in the Smart Meat Factory. For example, if an employee is looking for an order of 30 units of Parma ham, the computer voice of the “pick by voice” system could guide the employee directly to the right position of the shelf. Industry 4.0 professionals combine voice control with other systems such as “pick by vision”. When the picker arrives at the destination, lamps and digits on the shelf indicate the appropriate tray with the available quantity of ham.
Link the ERP system and the machines
Today, machines and the ERP system easily communicate with each other. Meat and sausage producer Wolf is currently running a project to link all filler lines with the central ERP system. Their goal: Absolute transparency of the filling process. The interaction between the ERP system and the machine software enables monitoring of the department as well as on-demand target-performance comparisons of planned and actual data. The result: Another step towards the determination of OEE measures.
Success Factor No. 3:
Prioritise IT in new-build projects
As illustrated in the first two points, building the Smart Meat Factory is first and foremost an IT project. Consequently, information technology is a key element of planning, organisation and implementation. Entrusting a general contractor with planning a new building is common practice. However, you should make your own decisions, together with your team, when it comes to the right IT technologies and infrastructures, as these will be highly strategic. Choosing an inadequate control software usually will have much more serious consequences than investing in the wrong machine. A machine could be replaced much more easily and faster than an ERP system.
This is how you can find the right IT partner for your project:
1. Only experienced IT vendors who have supported greenfield or brownfield projects in the meat industry before will be able to handle the complexity of the projects.
2. Ideally, the IT partner should have experience in managing projects of various sizes. What good would it be if you as a medium-size butcher enterprise want to build a small distribution center, but your partner can only think big?
3. For new builds, just like for all projects in the meat industry, it ultimately comes down to real industry knowhow. Only someone who knows the background of meat processing will be able to organise a new building in a smart way.
Success Factor No. 4:
Make buildings and material flows future-proof
Of course, your primary aim is not to produce data, but to manufacture meat products. Also in this case, flexibility and expandability are the key. Architects of the Smart Meat Factory must do a good job when it comes to the design and its “physical” implementation. As a rule of thumb, the buildings must be as energy-efficient as possible, and the dimensions of the rooms must be variable. Especially important is a linear material flow direction to ensure efficient production processes. The room layout should, above all, be expandable to a high degree in order to facilitate growth – unless you know today what you will produce in five or ten years from now, and which technologies you will use then. If you build a factory today with a view to a future that is not clearly foreseeable in almost all industries, you should not block your spatial flexibility. This is particularly true for the following areas:
Production and logistics
As a basic principle, the layout should be designed in such a way that the products follow a linear and continuous production path. This can be easily achieved with a square core without columns and as few cornered base areas as possible. Offices could be placed along a side of the hall, while goods receiving and shipping should be located at opposite ends of the hall. Rooms without columns may be more expensive, yet they provide the required flexibility in case of a short-term, far-reaching change to entirely new product variants, such as cultured meat.
Picking
The staging zones for transport trolleys and crates are frequently designed too small, which quickly causes space deficits. Therefore, options for an expansion should be considered in the high-level concept.
Warehouses
In many concepts, the warehouses are planned and built too small. This mistake can only be corrected through major investments, which means building another warehouse or renting additional storage space. Both solutions are costly in the short and long term. So you had better think big when you plan your warehouses.
Success Factor No. 5:
Automation and robotics bring the interaction of data and goods flows to perfection
For the interfaces of data to material flows, now more and more solutions are available that will boost the performance. What is more, cutting-edge automation solutions have become the cornerstone of the Smart Meat Factory. The greatest potential currently lies in intralogistics. Many meat companies have developed ground-breaking standards in this area, in particular for automated production and packing facilities, semi-automated picking systems, automatic depalletisers, sorters and high-bay storage facilities for pallets or single crates.
Automated weigh price labeling
Many meat factories supplying the retail sector use automatic sorter picking in order to deliver to the
subsidiaries as fast as possible. They can work in parallel at several lines at high speed: The ordered products are retrieved from the inventory with the aid of the software, supplied to the picking lines, weighed and labeled in single package mode according to customer specifications. In the end, they are automatically ejected at one of the channels and distributed to the containers. This automated process enables an Austrian cutting and packing facility to label and pick over 2,000 packages per hour.
Robotic warehouses increase the flexibility
ProMessa BV, a Dutch manufacturer of pre-packed meat products, uses a robotic warehouse: Controlled by the software, the single-item containers with attached barcodes are transferred from production to the logistical system and moved to one of the two warehouses. Small-quantity units are stored in a conventional single-position high-bay storage facility. Fast-moving products, which are sold quickly and in large quantities, go into the fast-mover warehouse.
This area gantry robot warehouse uses a storage technology that is relatively new to the meat industry. What is special about this type of storage is that containers are not placed on shelves, but stacked directly on the hygienic storage floor. One of the reasons for the high performance of the area gantry is that up to seven containers, as required, can be moved simultaneously during stock entry and removal. In order to assure adherence to the FiFo principle (First in – First out), the warehouse is constantly reorganised by re-stacking the plastic containers. This process, too, is controlled fully automatically by the CSB-System.
Success Factor No. 6:
Be prepared for innovations and technology trends
In this way, you are well positioned to introduce or add on new technologies in the future, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Andrew Ng, professor at Stanford University, sees AI as the “new electricity”. In fact, today’s AI algorithms and Deep Learning Systems still lack efficiency in production environments. However, this could change abruptly within a few years’ time, as AI not only improves routine processes, but will also extend to creative planning activities.
The growing importance of this subject was also demonstrated by the food survey on digitisation that CSB has conducted in 2018: The respondents rated the potential of collaborative robots and AI in the food industry as very high. But it could be worth looking even further ahead.
Take advantage of brain interfaces
As an exciting further development of pick-by-voice or pickby- vision and other BMI technologies, production planners should keep focus on the application of “brain interfaces”. Via electroencephalography and holographic displays, the employees literally control their production machines through mind-reading.
Utilise software algorithms
Apart from that, machines and software will handle many jobs that today are still assigned exclusively to the employees. For example, in quality control, image recognition systems can detect contamination and damage of the meat ever more precisely than and just as reliably as the human operators can. At other stations, the system correctly counts the number of parts and indicates the weight based on volume estimates. The decisive innovations are not to be expected for the hardware of the cameras and optical measurement and control systems, which are in fact quite advanced now, but in the field of software algorithms, which can perform calculations and comparisons much faster and more reliably than a human being can.
Success Factor No. 7:
Take account of the integration beyond company boundaries
Finally, the local optimum for your factory is not necessarily the optimum for your entire enterprise. The Smart Meat Factory will maximise its potential if it is integrated across the boundaries of the factory and the corporation. You can flexibly improve your production across all factories and respond quickly to consumer trends, changes in demand for example due to weather conditions, or particularly favourable prices of certain types of meat in the procurement market.
The top priority for the Smart Meat Factory should therefore be to update all players in the value chain to a consistent level of information. Ideally, the aim is to operate always at the limit of the resources, but not of the capacity. The closer you stick to the resource limit, the higher is the average capacity utilisation and the use of production means, and the lower are the unit costs. In this context, the following starting points can help:
Nullify inventory levels
How can you uncouple needless physical levels, i.e. is buffers between vendors and the factory? The more accurately SCM requirements can be defined, the easier such uncoupling will be. The better the information, the less will you be obstructed by your inventories.
Identify the order penetration point
Up to which stage can the factory produce standard products “anonymously”, i.e. for any customer? At which stage will the customer receive something special? By keeping your production independent of specific customer orders as much as possible, you can manufacture larger quantities and batches under stable conditions. The later you branch into customer-specific production, the better can you plan the entire goods flow.
Analyse and control process chains
Today, the software system allows you to control all relevant stations integrated in the SCM process chains in a transparent manner. For example, animal weights can be planned in advance from the stall up to cutting, distributed to the final products and compared with the expected sales data. Another option is to calculate the planned material costs of the animal in advance up to the final product and then to update the calculation at every station with the actual material costs.
This is a sponsored post by CSB-System. For case studies from CSB-System, visit the website, YouTube or LinkedIn.
