Food and Beverage

    Food manufacturers in Europe are under pressure to be able to trace every product at every stage of the supply chain. This legislation (EU directive 178/2002), which comes into force in the EU in January 2005, states that food manufacturers have to be able to show that they can trace products right through the food chain. The new regulations have pushed more of them towards seeking out efficient solutions to meeting the standards such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and distributed control systems (DCS). Advances in SCADA technologies have ensured improved IT compatibility along with the capability to support higher-level business systems such as manufacturing execution systems (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
    A Manufacturing Operations Management System (MOM4) describes the overall infrastructure needed to allow a firm to carry out all its tracing, tracking and product specification requirements efficiently and in a co-ordinate manner.
    In addition, the MES could closely monitor and control essential KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that include:

• Yields

• Throughput giveaway

• Quality and food safety

• Stock movements