Keeping production and packaging lines moving in these challenging times has become a key consideration for companies across the food processing industry, with worker illnesses and absences placing pressure on supply chains. Add to this the need to minimize downtime and the continuing growth of internet shopping and companies have a lot to think about.
JBT Proseal, which has a strong record in packaging innovation, is rising to meet these challenges with new developments in automation and data analysis, which have been designed to improve both productivity and food safety.
Limiting downtime
Focused on making life easier for processing companies, ProVision is a downtime analyser which gives managers a dashboard providing an overall view of all production lines and pinpoints any problems that might occur. “If you are the CEO of a business and you have 10 production lines and one of those has failed for a day, you will want to know about it,” says Proseal’s Head of Sales & Control Systems, Tony Burgess. “If, in all your 10 production lines, for one minute of every hour the line stops because of a failing piece of equipment, in a month’s time that will could have added up to one day’s lost production.
“ProVision will capture all of these micro instances and build a series of data. It will tell you exactly the downtime and cause of downtime over the last 24 hours. It allows the user to focus attention on the piece of equipment on the production line that is causing the downtime and do something about it, so it has an enormous productivity benefit.”
Dynamic growth
A further area where Proseal sees an opportunity is in the booming online market for food ingredients and ready meals driven by increasing consumer interest in cooking at home. Proseal, Burgess reveals, is supplying eco-friendly Halo tray forming equipment to Dineamic, an Australian company which delivers chef-cooked meals to consumers across the country. “Dineamic produces their own foods, seals them with Halo pack trays made in house with a Proseal tray sealer and then sends them mail-order,” says Burgess. “Similar work is being done in other geographic locations.”
However, such developments are not just taking place in the food industry. Proseal, Burgess adds, is currently working on a project in the Netherlands for online flower orders by designing packaging options suitable for sending flowers by mail-order.