High demands of quality and efficiency in the food industry

The industrial food and beverage production is a highly automated industry that produces a great amount of food every day. The demand for excellent product quality and high production efficiency is a challenge for anyone on the factory shop-floor.

Repeating production stops lead to decreasing production efficiency and time-intensive troubleshooting tasks for the technicians. The troubleshooting process can be very difficult and complex. In order to find the root-cause, it is common that technicians have to wait at the production line or search through hour-long videos to see what happened.

How can you improve and shorten this time and cost-intensive troubleshooting process?

With the help of a smart video system developed for fast and easy troubleshooting in production. Film The Fault shows the technician directly the relevant video clip of a production stop to identify the root cause. The setup of the system is flexible to install at any machine, a robust smartphone records a video at the suspected area at the production line. When the production line has stopped, a dedicated SmartSensor detects and signals the stop to the phone.

As a result, all relevant video clips with faults get highlighted in the complete video and enable the technician to see what exactly happened and take immediate action.

Time saved for the technician

Thereby, the technician saves time in comparison to the alternatives of standing at the machine or searching for the fault in a long video. Filming with any other camera and analysing this video material requires time to find the fault and typically goes along with large files which are hard to transfer.

A case in the food industry showed that a technician could save on average 1 hour at a production fault by using the Film The Fault system compared to the alternatives. Assuming an average usage of 4 times a month and an internal hourly cost around 50€ for a maintenance technician, the time saved is worth 200€.

Minimised stop time in production

The quick troubleshooting does not only save time for one technician but also for the whole production line which is affected by the fault. Usually in the food production the processes of filling, packaging and palletising are connected and have few buffer zones. Therefore, a stop at one process could easily cause a whole line to stand still. Depending on the complexity of the fault reason, a stop could take a couple of minutes up to a few hours to identify and repair the production.

The example case in the food industry demonstrated that with the Film The Fault video system, a production stop could be shortened by 30 minutes. Even though such an issue in the production only occurred once a month, the identification of the root cause via the video clip is saving even more time. It enabled the technicians to adapt the machines and avoid the production to stop for a second and third time for the same reason in this month.

The hourly rate of a working production line varies depending on which costs or losses are taking into account. In this case it is assumed to be 500€. Consequently, the actual time saving of 30 minutes plus an avoided potential loss of at least another 60 minutes equals a value of 750€ in this month.

So how to save time worth 950€

Summarising the time saved for a technician worth 200€ and the production time saved worth 750€ adds up to saved time worth 950€ in one month.

On top of that, imagine that more than one person could be involved in the root cause analysis. Or that a production fault could possibly repeat more often than 2 times a month. Then, the value of the saved time might be significantly higher than 950€. The actual numbers for each factory differ obviously and depend on the frequency of faults which can be solved by the fault videos as well as many other factors.