Centralised production line Management

  By MIKAEL SAMUELSSON
Tetra Pak - Director Automation Solutions

TODAY'S food and beverage producers deliver to exacting requirements — providing products of the highest quality that inspire unshakable confidence whilst constantly improving production efficiency and profitability. Ensuring this across complex and interdependent processing and packaging systems is a delicate balance. Thanks to Tetra Pak' innovations in automation, integration and traceability solutions, today's producers can achieve maximum efficiency and quality to strike this balance.

Evolving automation
For a number of years, automation has played an important role in helping to achieve greater production efficiency, controlling equipment and the movement of products through the factory. As market demands and technology progress, however, traditional automation alone will not rise to all the challenges of a changing industry. Today and in the future, success will depend on the innovative application of automation solutions.
Automation has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, moving on from the simple linking of individual pieces of equipment. The Tetra Pak "iLine" aseptic carton packaging solution is a perfect example of how Tetra Pak is pushing the boundaries of automation. Employing the latest technologies, the latest solutions increase equipment reliability and capacity to reduce operational costs.
At the heart of the Tetra Pak iLine is a new automation platform that allows each component in the line to talk to all the others via Ethernet Protocol addresses and Ethernet connectivity. The system enables industry-first centralised production line management. This can help producers to reduce production costs by up to 40 per cent, bringing substantial advantages in a competitive marketplace.

Integration, information and traceability
As the Tetra Pak iLine demonstrates, the vastly enhanced control and data acquisition capabilities of the latest generation of automation systems offer benefits that go far beyond production efficiency.
For Tetra Pak's customers, uniformity of ingredients, taste and quality is paramount. In globalised and increasingly standardised markets, retailers and consumers expect consistency in every single product. Growing consumer awareness of food safety is also driving demand for more information on the beverages they buy. This, in turn, is leading to increasingly stringent food safety laws, with compliance often dependent on the provision of regular and detailed production data.

In terms of integrated automation, Tetra Pak set the pace over a decade ago with the introduction of its Tetra "PlantMaster" solution. It's a constantly evolving suite of automation solutions that today not only brings ongoing efficiency, but, in enhancing traceability, also the means to guarantee quality and inspire and maintain confidence. The latest generation of Tetra PlantMaster unite the packaging line monitoring system, PLMS Centre, and line controller system, LC 30, to integrate both processing and packaging activities and deliver factory-wide control.
Traditionally, traceability has only allowed the tracking of ingredients. If producers wanted to review quality or processing data, they needed to access it from separate databases, which obviously delays the process. With Tetra PlantMaster, however, the control system collects all the information together in real time. Operators and quNike Air Max 1 For Sale