Plant Design/Management

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The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has allowed many professions to rethink how they do business, including meat and poultry processing plants. Increased automation and robotics allow plants to continue operations, while limiting the risk of infecting workers — or animals.

Managers at aging processing plants are poised to improve or replace their existing wastewater systems. What will they find? Innovative, sustainable and less expensive cleaning systems that now require smaller footprints.

Filling a sandwich is not particularly difficult, unless it is being done on an industrial scale with a throughput of thousands of sandwiches per hour. One American business is making a determined effort to further automate the process.

Spare parts inventory must be understood backward, but it must be planned forward.

It is almost impossible to be successful in any activity if you don’t fully understand the rules that govern success. By rules, I mean the way different elements of the activity interact and influence each other in order to achieve your goals. 

The first duty of any food or drink manufacturer is to supply consumers with safe products. While it is essential to maintain good equipment hygiene through the use of effective protocols, such as clean-in-place (CIP) systems, it is also economically important that perfectly usable product is not discarded as part of routine cleaning operations.

For a second year in a row, beef recalls are up and on pace to eclipse last year’s figure. By November 2019, 27 recalls were ordered (compared with 31 overall in 2018, totaling 13 million pounds of beef), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Three-dimensional (3-D) printing — or more correctly, Additive Manufacturing (AM) — has the potential to change everything with respect to spare parts inventory. As the technology develops, people will be able to manufacture parts at almost any location, at any time they choose.