Improving Food and Beverage Manufacturing Reliability

Food & beverage manufacturers are driven by consumers not only to maintain high levels of consistency with existing products, but also to develop and deliver new, experiential products.

Emerson's Dennis Belanger


Maintaining consistency and running new production lines require reliable operations to stay competitive and deliver returns to fund new developments. Emerson’s Dennis Belanger , a reliability expert and member of the Operational Certainty Consulting team, shared ways food & beverage manufacturers can increase overall operational reliability.

Increasing reliability means reducing the frequency, duration and impact of planned and unplanned events. Important in these reliability improvements is capture data from the production lines and convert this data into enhanced insights through advanced analytics to improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and reduce downtime.

Dennis highlighted opportunities in three areas: flow instrumentation and performance monitoring, condition monitoring of assets, and building a culture of reliability through changes in work practices and incorporation of new technologies.

 Smart instrumentation such as Micro Motion Coriolis flow, density and viscosity meters self-diagnose to provide early indications of issues. Sophisticated advance phase measurement (APM) and Smart Meter Verification in these devices spot air entrainment conditions that can lead to unplanned events as well as monitor the entire flow meter’s performance and integrity–without requiring you stop your process.

By measuring the vibration, temperatures, pressures, acoustics, etc. of rotating machinery and other plant assets, reliability-based analytics support predictive maintenance practices across the production process and packaging lines to help avoid costly unplanned downtime. Based on the equipment application and criticality, Condition Monitoring solutions deliver needed information for accurate diagnosis and resolution often before downtime occurs.

Technology alone does not deliver more reliable operations. Having a trusted partner to provide Reliability Consulting opens a path from current performance to higher performance. Working together, an optimized reliability program can be designed and implemented—from planner training and mentoring to reliability (RCM), failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO).

Dairy production facilityDennis shared a success at a large global dairy producer that was challenged with ensuring thorough sanitation during the cleaning process without using excessive amounts of water. They were experiencing a 50% failure rate on their measurement devices.

Working the Emerson team, they came up with a solution to incorporate reliable conductivity measurements which were used to indicate the end of the cleaning cycle. This solution using Rosemount 410VP four-electrode conductivity sensors required fewer sensors due to high and low conductivity measurement capability, less maintenance and training, and elimination of extra water discharge into the holding tanks.

These improvements resulted in costly downtime avoidance valued at $100,000/hour due to improper clean-in-place operations.

Visit the Food & Beverage section on Emerson.com for other examples of how these technologies and application experts can maximize production at your facility. You can also connect and interact with other food & beverage experts in the Food & Beverage group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

The post Improving Food and Beverage Manufacturing Reliability appeared first on the Emerson Automation Experts blog.