By Eric Weisbrod – Product quality is the foundation for success in food manufacturing. It’s what keeps consumers safe, satisfied, and coming back again and again. Quality issues, on the other hand, can lead to big problems. Think wasted resources, regulatory fines, and damaging recalls that all hurt a food manufacturer’s bottom line.
To consistently produce top-quality products, food manufacturers need high levels of visibility and control over their production processes—across all products, production lines, and plants in their organization. Given this need, outdated quality tools like paper checklists, spreadsheets, and legacy software systems are no longer enough to get the job done.
Instead, manufacturers should look for modern quality management tools that enable access to real-time, accurate quality data—from anywhere, at any time. That’s why more and more organizations are now collecting, centralizing, and analyzing their quality data in the cloud.
Let’s look at four major benefits of cloud-based quality management, as well as examples of food manufacturers who have successfully harnessed the power of the cloud within their own operations:
1.Real-time quality monitoring of products and processes
Food manufacturers must be able to quickly identify and correct any quality or safety issues. Unfortunately, paper-based processes and legacy quality systems make it nearly impossible to detect problems as they happen.
When relying on paper or a legacy system, data needs to be captured manually. Then, it must be prepared for analysis, which might include transcribing handwritten forms into an Excel spreadsheet, merging multiple spreadsheets, or importing data from multiple other systems. Quality data may not even get reviewed until the end of a production run, shift, day, or even longer—so quality issues and process deviations go undetected during that time. Overall, it’s a time-consuming, error-prone process that leaves everyone running a few steps behind.
But with modern cloud-based statistical process control (SPC) solutions, operators and quality teams don’t have to stay stuck in firefighting mode, reacting to one big problem after another. Cloud-based SPC solutions can automatically collect and monitor data from production processes as they happen. If the system detects any variations or issues, it sends immediate alerts to the appropriate operators and other relevant plant personnel. They can take timely corrective or preventive action, which keeps problems from getting out of control and prevents unsafe, subpar products from reaching customers.
And since all quality data gets stored and analyzed in a centralized cloud repository, everyone stays on the same page and collaboration is much easier. Quality personnel and plant managers can access the information they need to keep operations running smoothly, even when working away from the plant floor.
Notably, the cloud’s scalability also enables phased implementations for easier, more manageable change. Food manufacturers can start small, applying a cloud-based SPC solution to monitor a single line or process. As they learn the system and see results, they can rapidly scale their implementations as needed.
The cloud in action: Bakery on Main is a gluten-free and celiac-friendly breakfast and snack foods producer. Dedicated to product quality and consumer safety, the bakery wanted to move away from reactive, paper-based quality control, in favor of a modern solution for real-time, data-driven quality assurance.
First, Bakery on Main deployed a cloud-native quality management platform to digitize data collection for a single process within its plant in East Hartford, Connecticut. After seeing immediate benefits, the bakery quickly scaled its implementation across all lines and processes in the plant.
Now, large TV screens installed throughout the facility display dashboards and data visualizations that show operators, production managers, and quality executives exactly how processes are performing and trending in real time. If a process deviates from specifications, the cloud solution sends automatic alerts to team members. They can then resolve quality and safety issues before they get out of hand, and even stop issues from happening in the first place.
2.Insights for continuous improvements, across the entire enterprise
Many food manufacturers collect quality data to catch production problems, but never really examine data that indicates everything is working just fine. However, in-spec data hold a wealth of valuable insights into opportunities for continuous product and process improvements.
Cloud-based quality systems with advanced analysis tools can help key personnel—like quality professionals, plant managers, and Six Sigma teams—see the big picture. With historical data from all processes, machines, and shifts aggregated and summarized in the cloud, manufacturers can quickly spot and address concerning trends before a problem ever occurs, as well as pinpoint opportunities to further refine processes. The result? Big savings.
And with the cloud, quality improvements are not limited to single plants. Data from all processes, lines, and plants in an entire organization get standardized, aggregated, and centralized in the cloud. From there, data visualizations and analysis tools help quality teams compare plant-to-plant performance and uncover actionable insights for organization-wide improvements.
