By Thomas Burke, Global Strategic Advisor at the CC-Link Partner Assn.
With the need for increased quality control and assurance, regulatory compliance as well as auditing, it is essential for manufacturers in the food & beverage sector to adopt data-driven smart manufacturing strategies. These offer a unique way to set up full traceability and transparency across plants, enterprises and even entire supply chains.
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is one step toward smart manufacturing. TSN is a set of open network communication standards designed to enhance standard Ethernet. It provides deterministic, low-latency communication in industrial applications. This allows for the synchronization of data transmission so time-critical applications like motion control and automation can be prioritized, providing greater reliability and performance in manufacturing.
By taking this approach, businesses can gain an in-depth understanding of their processes, which leads to real-time actionable insight. This enables them to enhance monitoring activities, improving end product quality and consistency while reducing reworks and off-specs materials.
In addition, the data generated and collected can be leveraged to streamline and facilitate auditing as well as regulatory compliance. Ultimately, these benefits lead to substantially increased productivity and product yield.
Even more, traceability can help food and beverage manufacturers to gain a competitive edge by sharing some of the generated product knowledge with customers. 81% of grocery shoppers indicate that transparency is “important” or “extremely important” when shopping online and in-store, according to a report by The Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and Label Insight. In addition, a 2018 study from the same organizations showed that over 70% of the shoppers surveyed were more likely to switch to a brand that provides more in-depth product information beyond what is provided on the label.
Convergence and determinism
In order to create successful data-driven factories that offer data transparency as well as traceability, it is necessary to create a highly interconnected production system, where knowledge and actionable insight are generated and communicated effectively. Therefore, it is necessary to have a network that can share vast amounts of data in a timely manner to support analytics, reporting and real-time control. Consequently, companies need to select an industrial communications technology that can support these functions and capabilities.
This is where Time-Sensitive Networking comes in.