Top three automation challenges facing food manufacturing
What are the top 3 automation challenges facing food manufacturers? As a company, we invest 8.2% of our turnover into R&D, so we’re keen to keep on top of the major trends in our industry. We conducted market research to establish what challenges food manufacturers are facing as they enter 2016 to ensure that our APRIL Robot Chef, a flexible fully automated processing cell, can provide the answers that manufacturers need. Here’s what we found; the top three challenges reported may not surprise you.
OAL Food Safety
1. Food safety & traceability
Unsurprisingly food safety and traceability tops the list of challenges that face food manufacturers. Food manufacturers have a duty of care to ensure that food is safe for people to eat and thus the ability of automation to ensure traceability is critical.
Through discussions with respondents, stricter regulations and complexity presented challenges to ensuring complete traceability through existing food production systems. Tracking product/ingredients through all stages of sourcing, processing and distribution with the complex nature of supply chains and sheer number of SKUs is no easy feat.
OAL has been developing solutions as part of their OAL Connected software to overcome these challenges whilst offering real-time data for both food safety and factory efficiency. A key aspect of this development is building the paperless factory. Paper systems do not offer the level of assurance to overcome the challenges highlighted and easy to use paperless control systems have been a cornerstone of OAL's work. Integrated product tracking with ERP systems through SCADA enables complete traceability of products from the first receipt of goods in, right through to dispatch.
OAL Packaging
2. Packaging
Packaging was the second most highlighted challenge and it's little surprise with the number of format changes and regulations that food manufacturers face. Packaging has always changed but 2013 saw the boom of healthy eating, and manufacturers have been under ever-increasing pressure to ensure that food packaging appeals to customers. This changing consumer landscape has raised issues in the flexibility of automated packaging systems to respond to change.
The rising number of packaging variations has heightened the risk of the wrong product being placed in the wrong packaging; a nut product with the incorrect packaging could have fatal consequences. Back in 2004, OAL was involved in the development of Autocoding with Tesco and Geest (now Bakkavor), and the introduction of 2D barcodes to ensure that every piece of product packaging is correct. This was a major step forward as 2D barcodes meant the lids, sleeves and packs could all be identified by a barcode scanner.
OAL has experienced first-hand the importance of flexibility and an ability to adapt to the changing packaging formats, working closely with customers to ensure compliance with retailers codes of practice. As the trend for packaging variations grows, they see this as a key area for continued collaboration to ensure packaging security.
3. Cost of implementation
Finally, in a very respectable 3rd position was the least surprising problem reported, Cost. The initial cost of implementing automated solutions is high but existing systems have often lacked flexibility. The flexibility of the systems is critical in allowing soft reconfiguration to accommodate evolving consumer tastes; attempts at previously achieving automation have often missed this key component resulting in costly white elephants.
APRIL the Robot Chef from OAL seeks to eliminate this issue of flexibility by using principles from Manufacturing 4.0 to deliver a truly flexible modular solution. Coupled with the cost of robotics and automation dropping because of strong adoption in other industries, OAL believes the challenge of the cost of implementing automation can be overcome.
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About the survey
OAL contacted a wide range of food manufacturers and the results were based upon 97 respondents. Respondents varied in roles with a good cross section of line managers to business directors.
