Food and beverage (F&B) production typically involves complex equipment that is often developed and added to over time. Readying these installations to meet future requirements requires an update to the automation, monitoring and control systems involved. The manufacturing industry requires high levels of flexibility to adapt to changeable requirements in an agile and dynamic way. This is the case in the F&B industry, which faces specific challenges.

Diverse Requirements

A common challenge of the F&B sector is its unique characteristics, as the industry is distinguished by a great diversity of production methods. For example, the processes required to produce staple foods, such as flour or vegetable oil, are wildly different from those for pasta, coffee or potato chips. Even greater are the differences in the methods involved in drinks, jam or ready-meal production.

In addition to production, packaging and storage processes also play essential, and often varied, roles. Food and beverage manufacturers often manage bottling plants and packaging machines as well as production equipment. For some time in this industry, water, energy supply, building automation and intralogistics have also been considered integral to production facilities. The machinery and control system hardware and software across these operations have often grown organically over several decades, resulting in a patchwork of technologies. However, on the journey to end-to-end production digitalisation, full replacement of the equipment is not feasible for most producers, so an alternative is required — like COPA-DATA’s zenon platform.

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Connecting facilities

In F&B production, the zenon software platform is widely used for plant automation. It facilitates efficient engineering and automated operation of production plant and machinery. In fact, zenon also helps companies to handle operational situations and to maintain them in critical production facilities and infrastructures under extraordinary circumstances. Developed and continually improved over several decades, the software implements a high degree of automation to ease the handling and operation of complex equipment, its maintenance and engineering.

Securing the future

Moreover, security is becoming increasingly important in the F&B industry. zenon therefore relies on central data storage and management of the underlying databases to meet the growing requirements. These include contemporary encryption methods, as well as multi-level authorisation and authentication mechanisms. Secure data management makes it easier for food and beverage producers to meet formal obligations of proof. This ensures full traceability of all processes in compliance with international regulations and legal provisions.

As of zenon’s version 10, the security mechanisms are supplemented by the electronic signature — known as eSignature. It can be used to securely document the critical parameters of recipe or value changes. This makes it easy for users to implement the attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original and accurate (Alcoa) traceability scheme and the relevant food and drug administration (FDA) regulations.

This allows companies to meet industry’s current and future requirements, which is crucial when creating a supply system by integrating production lines, production sites and energy management systems.