From the executive level to operations and maintenance, no matter what your position in the food and beverage manufacturing industry is, at least one aspect of your role will rely heavily upon accurate data from your processing plant. Not all data are the same, however, and the information that tends to be most ineffective is usually data that arrives incomplete. The problem with missing and unreliable data is that when it starts circulating throughout your facility, the negative impacts can be difficult to manage and hamper your operations.
Optimal-decision making requires maximal transparency and access to accurate product information. Concerning the quality of your information, your process improvement initiatives will always reap what they sew when you discover that your data is corrupted or incomplete. You want all your to base decisions on fundamentally true and correct data. But how do even find this assurance?
Below is a list of a few common obstacles and considerations most food and beverage processors deal with that can influence their decision-making throughout the year:
- Equipment and materials expenses
- The rising cost of raw materials
- Quality assurance
- Facility and equipment maintenance
- Advertising and sales
- New supply chain partners
- Marketing demographics
- Strategic growth initiatives
- Digital transformations
- Research and development
Unreliable supply chain data is problematic for your business, but it also brings several consequences and accounts that precipitously start to drain on wider economic activity. IMB has produced a recent study showing that incomplete data costs US corporations roughly $31 trillion in lost economic output. The problem of bad data can be a persistent one, as it currently impacts companies across the globe on a notable scale.
The team at EZSoft has worked tirelessly to develop solutions to improve the speed and accuracy of your data recording in a simple approach that can scale alongside your business. Emergent industrial automation solutions for food and beverage processing provide relevant data. These solutions give you consistent and accurate information that will present process improvement possibilities that your plant simply couldn’t access before.
Useless and incomplete data are distracting, to say the least. The impacts of bad process information are wide spreading, rendering problems in areas of your operations you’d never expect. In the following section, we’ll take a look at a few specific ways incomplete data impacts productivity at your processing plant.
1. Quality control
The industrial snack and baking industries depend on consistent product outcomes and packaging to the demands of their discerning customers. Reliable data in real-time is vital to maintaining optimal product quality in today’s fiercely competitive food and beverage industry.
Products that require precise temperature measurements, strict environmental controls, and other unique processing criteria rely on quick and accurate data to optimize their production cycles and distribution. When your data arrives incomplete, it almost always hampers productivity at your manufacturing facility.
2. Operating costs
The current inflationary environment has encouraged business owners to seek out ways of doing more with less with modern industrial automation solutions. And, on top of this, the aggregate costs of bad data to manufacturing businesses are through the roof. Bad data doesn’t just cost you in the production and distribution stages. Compliance mistakes and failed audits could saddle your business with federal, state, and local regulator fines, not to mention a litany of potential lawsuits from your consumers.
3. Operator and equipment productivity
The top manufacturers almost never experience downtime and always support optimally efficient production lines. When your data is missing and can’t consistently deliver, your food manufacturing plant is less productive than it should be. Plants that still rely on manual, paper-based documentation processes invest too much time and labor into fixing their mistakes when they could be increasing their throughput.
When the information from the factory floor is unreliable, you’ll never find clear results. This lack of visibility makes tasks like strategic planning and developing process improvements a challenge. Poor data always translates to less efficiency.
4. Brand perception
If you run a food manufacturing plant, you’re already aware of the intense pressures from both customers and regulatory agencies to keep your processes and ingredient lists transparent. Bad data or incomplete introduces several risk factors that come with serious ramifications should, you fail to acknowledge them early enough.
Unreliable data can influence every area of your business, from the way you acquire raw materials to how you distribute your final product to retailer shelves. One simple data mistake can result in a public relations nightmare that might take years to overcome. A declining brand reputation because of a bad data error often poses an obstacle to recruiting the top talent in your industry, as well.
Bad data leaves your plant less behind in the marketplace
When you come to rely on bad data, you lose your competitive edge and risk falling behind in your respective marketplace. Today’s technology-dependent manufacturing environment demands that you constantly find ways to do more with less to keep up with your industry counterparts.
Bad data holds your business back in ways that are often difficult to predict. This problem causes issues that build up over time into serious problems and ultimately end up causing you to relinquish an otherwise promising position in the marketplace.
Never assume that simply because your data is incomplete that this same shortcoming follows your competitors. Effective industrial automation solutions to bad data are readily accessible to businesses that seek them out. The longer you back-burner your plans to automate your plant and streamline more accurate data, the more opportunity the competition has to make gains on your or extend its existing lead.
Avoid data-related disruptions with industrial automation software
EZSoft provides high-quality software integration services and superior documentation and testing protocols to clients in the food and beverage, life science, metal manufacturing, and chemical processing industries.
If you’re wondering where to find industrial automation companies near me, consider partnering with EZSoft in Pennsylvania. To learn more about our next-level documentation and process controls systems, complete our online request for contact for now or call us today at (484) 568-5040.
