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Data acquisition upgrades target enterprise efficiencies at bakery

New automation and software technologies allow the plant floor to move production data to enterprise levels for better company efficiencies or response to food safety audits.

The mobile monitoring platform at Southwest Baking allows plant floor operators to create custom, mobile HMIs screens to show multiple types of KPIs.
The mobile monitoring platform at Southwest Baking allows plant floor operators to create custom, mobile HMIs screens to show multiple types of KPIs.

The food and beverage industry continues on its path to plant modernization. Options include full-scale automation, smart device upgrades, new control platforms, industrial networking upgrades, data acquisition software or improved supply chain systems. 

One path has been to integrate legacy control architectures with newer, open networking protocols that streamline data acquisition from different control architectures on the plant floor, which is a high priority due to FSMA.

Southwest Baking, a contract manufacturer based in Arizona, recently upgraded its facility with a plant monitoring system and a lean operational staff. The bakery uses Opto 22’s groov mobile monitoring platform to monitor key performance indicators such as weight measurement and average length parameters for its products.

The app and monitoring platform allows Southwest Baking to use this browser-based software from Opto 22 to build mobile monitoring interfaces and then allow production personnel to login via smartphone or tablet. The food manufacturer leans on all of its employees, both management and operators, to monitor 11,000 lbs./hr. of frozen product runs according to KPIs.

“We use it (monitoring platform) strictly [for] indicators, and it’s meant to be more than a HMI,” says Rob Wroblewski, plant engineer at Southwest Baking. “We don’t use it to actually control food processing; just for data in a useable format.”

The open platform communications’ unified architecture (OPC UA) industrial networking solution enables Southwest Baking to retrieve control data from many types of equipment at the plant, such as freezers, mixers and processing platforms.

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