Starkly stated sustainability targets such as ‘Net-Zero by 2030’ imply an inherent struggle, and while this may be true in certain arenas, there is a genuine opportunity to achieve environmental goals, automate accountability and improve profitability within manufacturing – all at once.

In this article, we’ll outline exactly how the right capabilities, infused with expertise, can offer a profitable and intelligent pathway to a brighter business and environmental future. Carbon is cash, and reducing your output means retaining capital and growing profitability for the future.

So how is this achieved? Firstly, by fostering a different mindset when conceptualising sustainability measures. Data on utility usage can tell you when you’ve used more or less, but this aggregated data doesn’t have the granularity to explain why. While this is fine for quantifying and reporting on consumption to participate in a carbon exchange, this approach offers no mechanisms to improve these figures. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Success and Sustainability

Novotek Solutions delivers operational technology with a methodology shaped by a deep knowledge gained in over three decades of experience in IT domains.

We’ve led the way in delivering all our projects to a high, IT-compliant standard. Our solutions are supportable, maintainable, and extensible to keep your operation fit for the future.

In decades past, manufacturers in various sectors have embraced initiatives focused on continuous improvement, aiming to enhance production yields, improve equipment reliability, and minimise waste in materials, labour, and capital. Advanced measurement systems that track metrics like machine downtime and material usage, leading to the establishment of comprehensive factory data infrastructures, all support manufacturers’ end goals.

These systems contextualise raw data by associating it with specific details such as order numbers and product codes. Advanced platforms like Proficy Plant Applications from GE Vernova can integrate data from primary sources like water flow meters into this contextual framework. This practice of collecting detailed data related to core equipment and products results in a robust dataset, which serves multiple purposes:

1. Automating Environmental and Compliance Reporting: Using directly measured consumption data to create regulatory reports and calculate incentives.
2. Enhancing Carbon Accounting: With varying standards for translating energy consumption into emissions, having granular data allows for flexibility in reporting and adapting to evolving auditing requirements.
3. Incorporating Footprint Analysis in Continuous Improvement: Analysing measured environmental factors alongside traditional performance metrics reveals the interplay between operational changes and environmental impact. Comparing a product’s footprint data across different times or locations helps identify significant variations.

This approach allowed a major North American brewer to spot cases where energy consumption varied when all other factors were equal. Measuring energy consumption next to production orders meant it could hunt for root causes through its efficiency management system.

Root causes for relative spikes in usage ranged from inefficient process control algorithms for heating or chilling equipment, inconsistent adherence to recipe setpoints, and poor power management relative to down or idle times. The brewer utilised this insight to make recipes and procedures consistent across all sites.

The result? The brewer met a 5-year energy-savings target in just three years!

Operator Behaviour, Transparency and Compliance

As more firms conclude that a functional information strategy is a critical first step in their sustainability journey, gaining the correct capabilities to gather and process data is essential. In times gone by, multiple data collection regimens assembled reports for different purposes, such as customers or regulators, which led to inconsistencies and undue workload on operators and analysts.

The alternative is a single data platform that serves multiple stakeholders, such as GE Vernova’s Plant Applications. Through a single platform, data is gathered once at an appropriate resolution, and the same data can then be repacked for multiple purposes.

Through this method, operations can automate the management and delivery of regulatory data. Adherence to future carbon passport schemes also becomes a process through which you already have the tools to deal with.

Turning to transparency, increasingly, customers are willing to pay a premium for ‘green’ products, where you can demonstrate a complete genealogy and the positive credentials of your products in total confidence. With a comprehensive data platform in place, you have the power to track and demonstrate the exact journey a product has gone through, from raw materials to finished goods. And that is not to overlook the power of transparent data on your operation.

With greater process visibility, automated with real-time data collection, operations gain the insight required for intelligence decision-making from the shop floor to the top floor. Ingesting and utilising this data with a powerful analytics platform drives an understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between asset performance and input consumption. This granular data is then fed into corporate EHS and carbon accounting systems, allowing true utility cost profiles to be a part of production costing and planning exercises. Manufacturers then use cross-plant metrics to accelerate best-practice identification and dissemination.

But that’s not where it ends; by embedding analytics into control and visualisation programs, operators can be presented with rich information to drive decision-making at the shopfloor level. By using intelligent systems in this way, operations can also ensure they are not held hostage to the availability of specialists.

Innovative Strategies in Sustainability

To demonstrate how adopting a manufacturing execution system can offer a ‘many birds for one stone’ solution, we can look at the capabilities and conditions of an operation both before and after implementation.

Before

Without a detailed understanding of how changing utility inputs will affect processes, efforts to be ‘green’ can cause efficiency and material losses while also potentially introducing quality or product safety risks.

The differences between equipment and processes also present difficulties in formulating an effective strategy. With better data collection, all elements of variability can be profiled – including materials used in processes.

After

Data-driven decision-making brings cost, quality and carbon footprint into balance. With the confidence to act backed by information, tuning processes and utility infrastructure ensures sustainability efforts do not compromise operational performance.

The root causes of overconsumption are more easily understood, and strategies to mitigate them can be formulated and actioned at pace.

The ‘Many Birds’ at a Glance

If we’ve demonstrated anything in this article, we hope it’s the broad scope of what’s possible when looking to drive sustainability – and reap the real rewards on offer for manufacturing! Here are the key takeaways of what’s on the table as we progress towards environmental goals:

1. Expose hidden relationships between production and sustainability factors.
   • A single MES solution provides insight into materials, recipes, assets and processes to find the root causes of the overconsumption of utilities.
2. Gain a single source of truth and improve the visibility of your consumption.
   • Granular data gathered by the single platform can be packaged, analysed and presented to serve many needs.
3. Integrate metrics and analysis to provide additional insight.
   • Automating analytics within a single, scalable platform provides value from the shop floor to the top floor and drives fast, accurate decision-making powered by information.
4. Automate regulatory compliance and power transparency and traceability.
   • Gain competitive capabilities to demonstrate green credentials to customers and other stakeholders.

Last but not least, and in a nutshell, why select Plant Applications from GE Vernova?

• Flexibility in Data Management: The platform can easily link basic time-series data from meters to a wider range of elements like materials, products, and events, all through straightforward configuration.
• Support for Multiple Stakeholders: Plant Applications offers a variety of reporting and analytics capabilities, catering to both internal stakeholders focused on improvement and external stakeholders, ensuring their diverse needs are met.
• Open and Layered Approach: Unlike many sustainability metrics systems that are manual or limited to specific sensors, Plant Applications enhances existing sensor, automation, and software investments, offering a more integrated solution.

Continue the conversation

Do you have any questions about sustainability and manufacturing? Chat to one of our friendly experts to find out more.

A vital convergence

Cybersecurity is a crucial concern. OT equipment has become more IT aligned by necessity through standard protocols and ethernet/IP connectivity. Like a bucket of cold water, this fact woke the IT world to the significant vulnerabilities presented by connected operational systems. Furthermore, the press has continued to fill with stories of backdoors exploited by nefarious actors and the dire consequences of which to reputations, service, and profitability.

It was time for OT to be taken seriously and become part of the IT estate with the same high standards and best practice approaches to security.

So, what does this mean for you as a manufacturer?

Firstly, you must ensure that your control systems, such as PLC, SCADA etc., are secure from threats by keeping systems up to date and only providing connectivity between systems that require it. Leaving your entire operation wide open, with everything connected to everything else, is particularly hazardous. The optimal solution is to establish communication channels secured via switches and routers, allowing protocols to be enabled and disabled as required. Through this method, you can install firewalls between departments to further mitigate the threat of a cybersecurity breach.

The second point to consider is access control. Users should only be granted permissions to systems they require within an IT-supported domain. Paired with appropriate password complexity, a policy of regularly changing those passwords can minimise a potential vector of attack.

Next is virtualisation. By abstracting OT systems from the IT hardware, you can install physical hosts in an environmentally controlled data centre; rather than the old method of putting server racks under desks in control rooms, where they were subject to dust, heat, and the occasional accidental kicking from a steel-toe-capped boot.

Rounding out this brief overview is patching and backups. Patching regularly, at the same frequency as IT systems, ensures systems are constantly kept up to date and reduces the impact of ‘timely’ vulnerabilities such as Log4j. We still visit sites where Windows XP, NT and Server 2000 are still in use. These operating systems are running long after official support has ended, meaning security patches are no longer available and the vulnerabilities are well known and widely published.

Because OT should now be firmly on your IT department’s radar, creating a thorough backup regime will mean your systems are recoverable in the event of data loss due to a ransomware attack, operator error or any other disruption.

Experience and Expertise

Novotek Solutions delivers operational technology with a methodology shaped by a deep knowledge gained in over three decades of experience in IT domains.

We’ve led the way in delivering all our projects to a high, IT-compliant standard. Our solutions are supportable, maintainable, and extensible to keep your operation fit for the future.

Read more

The best approach may be to let the data dictate where to focus your innovation efforts. Or, if there’s a lack of useful data, then that itself may be the answer.

In this whitepaper, Novotek UK and Ireland explains how utilities operators can get to grips with data management to create an effective data-driven approach to innovation. Covering how to consolidate and modernise assets for data collection, how to make sense of utilities data and which method to use to get the most long-term value from data, the whitepaper is an invaluable resource for utilities operations managers and engineers.

Complete the form below to receive a copy of the whitepaper.

Complete the form below to receive a copy of the whitepaper.

There are two types of food plant managers. There is the innovator, who is looking for new ways to achieve goals and improve systems, and the cost-conscious individual, who is looking for leaner and cost-effective solutions. Depending on your goal and the category you fall into, your systems and software should be specified and procured with that objective in mind.

Aligning your systems with your goals and aims for the business is the first step in this process. Being honest and realistic with these aims is vital, as without a clear view of what you want to achieve in your food plant, there is going to be disappointment, costly mistakes and confusion along the way.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to industrial automation, so systems will vary depending on the automation profile of the business. But what systems will benefit each type of food plant manager?

The Innovator

When thinking about innovation, one of the key components is data. With data comes the opportunity to view where improvements, changes and adaptations can be made. Data sources such as control systems and sensors are at the heart of the plant, and will grant access to the information that will change the game altogether.

Implementing these systems is relatively simple but, of course, you must have the necessary equipment to collect and record this data. To start with, you should at least have a SCADA system in place, connected to show an overview of system performance.

To facilitate greater innovation, you can look at installing an MES system, which gives more access and accountability to the humans in control of the systems. From a plant-wide overview through to granular production activity, the system collects data from sensors and industrial control systems and displays it in a ready to view state.

Insight is the key to innovation and that is what these systems offer. So, if you’re looking to change the world of food plants, there’s some food for thought to get you started.

The cost-conscious

When cost is top of the agenda, the systems and software you will look to are different to that of the innovator.

Instead of the wild and wonderful additions of new technologies, the key here is making the most of what is already on site. Optimising asset performance is relatively easy if you look towards an Internet of Things connected platform, such as GE Digital’s Predix platform. This kind of system can predict problems and outages before they occur and connect the factory to the wider logistics chain.

This software uses machine learning to detect normal behaviour and data sets. Automation can detect issues far quicker than a human worker, and can cross reference historical data to see if it is a recurring issue. Employing this kind of intelligence facilitates predictive maintenance to prevent future issues.

Considering your business goals is crucial when looking to improve systems and infrastructure. With so many different solutions to achieve different goals, it is impossible to think that there is one solution that could be rolled out across multiple plants.

Whenever a new trend comes along in the food industry, customer demand peaks quickly and manufacturers must adapt rapidly. This often means modifying recipes, recalibrating system settings and adjusting the production schedule. However, the plant manager still has the same facilities and manpower. This makes adapting to demand a challenge and often creates problems.

Plants must operate at optimum efficiency, with minimal downtime to ensure that the production can meet the output required by the customer. Production needs to be closely monitored and scheduled, otherwise the required amount of product will simply not be produced.

Currently, many plant managers use Excel spreadsheets to schedule production. However, with increased digitalisation across the whole plant, it seems illogical to base the production schedules on a manually created process that is open to human error and takes up valuable time.

Managing production schedules is almost like a puzzle. The plant manager must decide which product should be produced first and how much of each product to manufacture to meet the customer’s needs. While it could take the operator an hour to go through the different possibilities for production scheduling to find the optimum output, some production scheduling tools can work through the different options within a minute.

By using a digital scheduling tool, not only will the plant manager reduce the time taken to work out a schedule for the plant’s production, they will have a better overview of the plant.

Visualisation

GE Digital’s ROB-EX production scheduling tool has a visually simple dashboard that allows the involved managers to visualise the different production routes, stages in production, the workload and material consumption. Visual aids, such as different colours for different statuses, helps management to have a better understanding at a glance of how they are producing, which choices they should make and what is going on in the plant.

A scheduling tool like this should be connected with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) or supply chain management (SCM) system. ROB-EX has standard connectors for major ERP and SCM suppliers such as VISMA and SAP, so it can be easily integrated into an existing system, rather than creating additional workload for management.  

The scheduling tool allows plant managers to generate possibilities about what production needs to be take place and what materials are needed for the processes. This allows production to be managed in the most resource and time efficient manner.

Downtime

Downtime is a big problem in the food industry and even more so for manufacturers that are under increased pressure to produce products to tight deadlines. Any bottlenecks in production due to missing materials or poorly planned schedules can lead to the food manufacturer failing to meet the customer’s deadline.

An effective scheduling tool will immediately show any bottlenecks in resources, capacity or raw material. This should then be actionable data for the plant manager, who is able to optimize their production plan continuously, rather than acting reactively after the production has stopped.

Contamination

As anyone involved in the food production industry will know, contamination is a serious concern. Nuts, for example, have been identified by the EU as one of the most common ingredients causing food allergies and intolerances. Production therefore needs to be planned carefully to allow for the deep cleaning procedures to take place between the production of nut based products and nut free products.

While it can be difficult for the operator to balance the production schedule with concerns about contamination, a scheduling tool can take heed of the allergens contained within different products. It will then schedule production with this in mind.

For example, products containing peanuts would be produced at the end of a shift pattern, allowing production to stop as scheduled for the cleaning to take place, rather than having to stop production to clean in the middle of a shift. Production schedules are quite difficult to manage because of the huge amounts of products that often need to be produced, combined with the fluctuating demand and short lead times.

Vegetarian demand

Novotek has worked with one of the Netherland’s largest producers of vegetarian meat. The meat substitutes market is projected to grow at 6.8 per cent annually and reach $6.3 billion in 2023, so demand is high in this industry.

Interest was also sparked when the French Government banned the use of phrases such as vegetarian sausages or vegetarian burgers to describe meat substitute products. This also increased production for Novotek’s customer by 25 per cent.

The company recently invested in the ROB-EX scheduling tool to help their growth of up to 10 to 20 per cent every year. The company is having to produce a greater variety and volume of products with the same amount of people and equipment as before.

The manufacturer therefore approached Novotek with the need to streamline its processes. While they were unsure as to what tool would help them do this, Novotek consulted with senior leaders from the plant to identify that a planning and scheduling tool would help them to achieve their goals.

For this company, investing in a scheduling tool was relatively inexpensive and could be easily integrated with their existing IT- and forecasting systems. However, it allowed them to move away from manually planning production on a spreadsheet, to a better managed automated system. The system proposes the ideal production schedule from which the planner easily can choose.

This removed the need to manually decide what to produce at what time. This increased efficiency and reduced downtime will allow the company to meet the needs of its customers in line with the growth of the vegetarian food market.

This is just one example of a customer in a growing sector of the food industry where a scheduling tool allows them to better manage production to meet their customer’s targets. While growth in a market can be an opportunity for food manufacturers, if they are using old, manual systems, it can put too much pressure on planners and operators and lead to mistakes in planning production. By automating scheduling, plant managers can ensure that their production is planned correctly and any potential issues are resolved before they arise. Edible algae is one trend that we wouldn’t have predicted several years ago, so we can only predict what the new food trends will be in years to come. With this in mind, plant managers should consider whether their current production scheduling system is up to task, and if an automated system would allow them to cope with a sudden increase in demand.