Solutions
Food & Beverage
Navigating the challenges of the food and beverage industry
The Food and Beverage industry faces numerous manufacturing challenges, impacting efficiency and quality. Diverse products, regulations and consumer preferences add complexity, creating further challenges to production, supply chain and compliance. Automation helps to address all this through increased precision, speed and consistency, and with robust, reliable solutions, minimizes downtime.
Industry challenges
Complex Production Processes
The inherent complexity of food and beverage manufacturing, including variations in recipes, ingredient characteristics and packaging makes it difficult to clearly see the whole process end-to-end. Additionally, there can also be difficulties when it comes to automating tasks that involve intricate, non-repetitive motion.
Automation solutions address these challenges while providing transparency and affording manufacturers the ability to act responsively to problems or change.
Customization and Product Variation
The demand for customized and niche products in the food and beverage industry is ever increasing, but this is contra to the needs of manufacturers where targeting high volume production is necessary to achieve economic viability.
Furthermore, adapting automated systems to handle variations in product size, shape, and packaging in a timely manner poses additional challenges.
Ensuring Return on Investment
High upfront costs associated with the purchase and implementation of automation technology can often put manufacturers off investing, but failure to act in a timely manner can produce far more detrimental effects, putting businesses at an avoidable disadvantage to their competitors.
Concerns about the Return on Investment (ROI) and the time it can take to realize cost savings are to be expected, however rather than taking an ‘all or nothing’ approach, a more sustainable long term automation investment plan overcomes this challenge and aids management with decision making.
Skilled Workforce Shortage
The demands on a skilled workforce to operate, maintain, and troubleshoot evermore complex production systems is increasing daily but the source of future employees can be unclear. Therefore, operating an effective combined enablement policy of training and skill development initiatives that reduces staff turnover is increasingly necessary.
Once the challenge of finding and training employees with the necessary technical expertise has been overcome, protecting that investment becomes equally important.