Industry 4.0, the automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, is creating numerous opportunities for food processing companies to digitize their supply and demand systems, thereby reducing waste and maximizing profitability.

Few industries, like food and beverage (factories and processing plants) deal with regulations that are even remotely as complex as this sector. Requirements are rigorous and the risks associated are high.

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and Codex Alimentarius are just two important regulations designed to proactively prevent foodborne illness and contamination. Both are important to be within guidelines which can be a serious task to your company.

Having systems that can manage compliance is critical. Also, managing recipes and formulations to make sure your suppliers can offer you the best materials at the best prices, priceless.

With that said, equally important is your ability to ensure that your equipment assets (tanks, pumps, ovens, and filling lines) are being properly maintained and monitored to prevent contamination and meet quality mandates. This information needs to be reported realtime and historical.

And, all of this information must be well documented and easily accessible for regulators and, of course, for the consumers purchasing these products for transparency.

In the event of a recall, having full visibility and transparency into the entire process (from raw material producers to manufacturers, transportation companies, and retailers) can help speed up the recall process and prevent contaminated products from reaching consumers, a safeguard that will protect your brand integrity, consumer confidence, and bottom line.

A traceability solution can help address these issues with precision by providing thorough traceability information to help quickly isolate and recall all finished goods and raw materials associated with any suspected product quality or safety issue. Understanding this is your first step in attaining Industry 4.0 success.

Industry 4.0 for the food and beverage food processing industry must include:

• Transparency – Innovation combined with Transparency
• Traceability – Food Quality, Safety and Traceability
• Sustainability – Sustainability with investments in the supply chain year over year

Transparency, Traceability and Sustainability – Industry 4.0

As food and beverage manufacturers develop or update their food safety goals—both inside and outside of the organization, integrating supply chain traceability as a key component of those goals should be top priority and will enable companies to:

• Be prepared for quality audits – Manufacturers can consolidate traceability data in one place and make it accessible with easy-to-understand visualizations.
• Be prepared for recalls – Data can be quickly mined backward to find the lots, batches, intermediary products, or raw materials that are the cause of a problem.
• Build a stronger supply chain network – Including and actively collaborating with suppliers on creating supply chain transparency will benefit all supply chain participants.
• Create new revenue opportunities – Traceable products will reach a larger market and consumers are more willing to pay a higher price point when they know where their products came from and what they contain.
• Identifying and improving inefficiencies – In your own manufacturing and throughout the supply chain.
• Use of technology – To achieve year over year savings.

How can Coolearth help?

Below are our robust solutions that can work in unison for all phases of the ingredient tracking, inventory control, labeling, processing, packaging, warehousing, and distribution operations. Digitizing data for easy access and robust reporting to help your organization attain Industry 4.0.

Whistle™ SCE/WMS Warehouse Management Solution, Data Collection that reduces costs while increasing inventory accuracy. Whistle virtually eliminates the tedious data entry associated with manual processing of warehouse transactions and ensures that the data is 100% accurate.
 
CaseForge™ Line Production Reporting, Designed for the line crew and/or manager to quickly pick their orders or items then case → weigh → and create labels.
 
CaseForge™ Station, Popular full-featured CaseForge software combined with our pre-engineered hardware solution becomes a robust turnkey solution for production line labeling and reporting.
 
Inspec™ QA-QC Quality Assurance, Free your QC from guesswork, tribal knowledge and inefficiency with integrated workflow, data collection and analytics designed specifically for Food & Beverage manufacturing.
 
ACRS™ / CERTS™ Telemetry Solutions, Collect data that triggers processes on the shop-floor to collection and reporting on data that automate routines and frees up employees time trimming the bottom line costs.
 
Lot Recall – Traceability, Full recall traceability for receiving and issuing ingredients, and packaging that comes into contact with product. Coolearth BI Recall Reports provide basic receipt, in-inventory, and shipment traceability information.
 
And… We pretty much integrate with just about any ERP EDI system on the market!

Industry 4.0 technologies provide significant opportunities to the food and beverage industry, including increasing productivity, improving food safety, reducing food and resource waste, and providing full supply chain transparency from production to consumers.