Today´s Food & Beverage industry is focused on transformation more than ever. Working with global companies and local heroes in this field, we identified three major drivers for transformation: innovation, digitalization and sustainability. I’d like to show you how one of our customers boosted their innovation by implementing a line efficiency system with zenon.
Innovation takes many forms. The Food & Beverage industry innovates new products increasingly quickly – whether they be new tastes, organic ingredients, or with optimized packaging material. Production processes are continuously improved to be more effective, more flexible and more sustainable. At the same time, we’re dealing with increased complexity, disturbed supply chains and resource scarcity. As consumer behavior changes, new business models are developed, sales channels are diversified and new buying experiences are created.
In this example, our customer wanted a system that could help them to meet these requirements – yet which would be flexible enough to be enhanced in the future.
Watch this video recording from fall 2021. Here, zenon is supporting continuous process improvements in packaging and product innovation and diversity so production teams can maintain line effectiveness at highest level:
What we can learn from this best-practice example
I’d like to invite you to take few minutes to reflect on the story in this video. We saw an organization taking ownership of its transformation journey.
One key factor in this success story is the agile approach to project management. The project team defined milestones, one by one, towards their vision. They made sure that every step was manageable in terms of smart goals, time and resources. At every step, the learnings and ideas from the previous step were integrated. Plus, they demonstrated successes at each stage – because the key to winning organizational buy-in is to show clear results along the way.
The second key decision was to use the zenon software platform. The project team could choose from the wide range of technologies exactly the building blocks and services needed to implement every step: from connectivity to packaging machines to sophisticated reporting templates. This way, each step achieved a proven return on investment and helped the end users in a pragmatic way. The manufacturing team walked the transformation journey with increasing experience and clarity.
A vision of transformation
The consistency of the zenon platform supports the overarching vision. The zenon software platform always frees users to design the next step in a flexible way, with less effort. Involving more people in the optimization effort, enlarging the solution across more equipment, implementing information flows from machine to ERP are just few examples. Therefore, the total cost of ownership stays low throughout the entire change process. Every version of zenon brings you the newest technologies, so you remain up to date and can realize the profit quickly.
Together, we have seen that the software platform maximizes the benefit of an agile approach when transforming your Food & Beverage manufacturing operations. Thus, you can lean into greater innovation – which is key in today’s business environment.
Further transformation drivers
As well as innovation, digital transformation fills the daily agenda of many people in the Food & Beverage industry. It should not be a goal by and of itself, but digitalization brings immense technological support for implementing innovation initiatives. Digitalization eases the way we deal with complexity and grows overall business. It can be seen as a cable car which accelerates your ascent dramatically. Learn more about zenon as enabler for your digital transformation here. This also includes a must-watch-video about real-life best practice.
Alongside everything else, sustainability tops the agenda as part of our collective mission to beat global warming. Today, the Food & Beverage industry addresses many aspects of sustainability, from optimizing energy consumption, choosing new ingredients, the circular economy, and using renewable energy sources. Innovation and digitalization have a role to play in your mission towards sustainability. If you’d like to know how another customer of ours has created a transparent production environment for carbon-neutral manufacturing, read and watch the story here.
Transformation towards your ultimate vision can be represented as journey towards the peak of a mountain. You may not reach the summit, but all progress towards it is very important.
What are your newest challenges? How can we help you accelerate your ascent of the transformation mountain? How can zenon help you in different areas of your manufacturing plant?
Making your life easier is our mission, together with our partner community and local representatives around the world.
I invite you to contact us, so we can talk together.
Simply drop me an e-mail or find me on LinkedIn.
Are you also interested in part II and part III of this series? Please find them here:
Leveraging plant floor data cleverly & easily (part II)
Targeting CO2 neutrality (part III)