TECH PERSPECTIVE AARON HAND | EXECUTIVE EDITOR
MES Provides Vision Needed in Competitive Distillery Sector The Bourbon Trail is facing tight margins and ever-growing market erosion, making the insights from Parsec’s TrakSYS software particularly helpful in terms of resiliency, asset reliability, and energy management. But the food and beverage industry overall could benefit from capabilities in OEE, recipe management, track and trace, and much more.
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VER THE PAST 12-15 YEARS, the food and beverage industry has embraced the manufacturing execution system (MES) as a musthave for the automated execution of orders, integrating from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) layer through to the plant floor to drive production efficiencies throughout, according to Jim Mansfield, senior manager for system integrator Matrix Technologies. Matrix—founded more than 40 years ago in Toledo, Ohio, and now with about 300 employees in seven locations—is one of the larger system integrators and engineering firms in manufacturing. It works in a variety of industries, including food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, life sciences, automotive, and chemicals. Considered a technology-agnostic system integrator, Matrix has relationships with a wide array of software stack providers. For the past few years, Matrix has been working with Parsec and its TrakSYS MES platform. Like Matrix, Parsec works in a range of manufacturing industries; Matrix is working with TrakSYS now on new opportunities in the specialty chemical sector. But the system integrator has also found that TrakSYS is particularly suited to the distillery business, where competition is tough, and margins are tight. Here, Mansfield and Jeff Panning, MES/MOM senior project manager for Matrix Technologies, offer their insights on the benefits that MES and manufacturing operations management (MOM) systems can provide to food and beverage production, especially among distilleries. PFW: Why would food and beverage manufacturers want to use an MES/MOM system in their operations? Panning: One of the big benefits is visibility to your equipment performance so you can make investment decisions. One of our premier distilling company clients had a shrink wrap machine that they were having
Jim Mansfield, senior manager, Matrix Technologies
Jeff Panning, MES/MOM senior project manager, Matrix Technologies
problems with the infeed on that machine. They went through a continuous improvement project to determine what the problem was and implement a solution. When it was time to make investments in other machines, they just didn’t have the data. Once they had TrakSYS in place, they were able to measure downtimes—how much downtime they have and the types of downtime. They were able to measure performance, availability, and quality before they made the investment and updates on one of the machines, and then again afterwards. They were able to get some visibility on what the difference was, and it helped cost-justify investments for the rest of their machines. PFW: What makes Parsec’s TrakSYS different from other MES platforms? Panning: One of the big advantages is the scalability, and the inclusion of everything in the package. Basically, you buy the TrakSYS package, and then based on what you’re trying to accomplish, you can buy different types of licenses. But the functionality is www.profoodworld.com
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| June 2021 |
PROFOOD WORLD
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