PET Food Processing - December 2018 - 61

OPERATIONS

Integrated

INTELLIGENCE
The value of real-time data and the potential ROI it
offers is driving automation in pet food processing.
By Jennifer Semple | jsemple@sosland.com

Manufacturing plants typically have a wide range of
process controls and automation, and pet food processors are notorious for implementing but not necessarily
integrating systems throughout a processing facility.
Automating each process and tying them together is no
easy task but Daniel Tramp, technical sales, companion animal division, Wenger Manufacturing, Sabetha,
Kansas, says in the pet food world, the overall benefits
are too valuable not to automate.
Process controls range from plant-level automation
that enables machines to communicate from one process
to the next, to data management and collection across
multiple systems, to a large, over-arching umbrella architecture that collects system-wide metrics, provides contextual data, shares it on the Industrial Internet of Things
(IIoT) or an internal internet, and provides operators and
management the ability to make changes to individual
processes as required. "The chase for higher level controls
and automation has been going on for years," says Paul
McKeithan, head of digital services at Bühler Aeroglide,
Cary, North Carolina. "These controls are important, but
it is time to empower the operator to make better realtime decisions. We can do this by leveraging IIoT platforms to transfer processing knowledge to the operator.
Having an operator make quick and correct decisions,
working in conjunction with advanced automation, is the
key to sustainable savings."
In pet food manufacturing, two different production
shifts or plants can make the same pet food to the same
specification, but at different levels of efficiency. Process
controls help automate efficiency and offer other tangible benefits. "In a typical environment, it is far cheaper
to reduce costs than to increase top line revenue through
organic growth or acquisition," says Travis Stoll, director of service and technology, Shick Esteve, Kansas City,
Missouri. "We are seeing increased automation in the
IIoT space throughout the lines. Monitoring various
sensors on the lines for contextual data is preventing

downtime, enabling us to respond more quickly or even
before uptime impacting events occur."
Data must keep up with the product throughput for
operators to make informed, cost-saving decisions. "I see
three-ring binders filled with hand-written production
and QA data everywhere," says Susan R. Newman,
Ph.D., director of professional services at METER Group
Inc. USA, Pullman, Washington. "Once data goes into
those binders, it's essentially lost. By the time someone
has manually entered the values into spreadsheets, that
product has already shipped. When an issue is not identified in time, a product that is not going to meet spec

Track and trace
systems can provide
the transparency
needed to prove the
inclusion or absence
of specific ingredients in products.
KSE Process Technology

www.petfoodprocessing.net | December 2018 | PET FOOD PROCESSING

http://www.petfoodprocessing.net

PET Food Processing - December 2018

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