Food packaging plants face a host of challenges in terms of eliminating food waste, improving safety and increasing uptime. These challenges are heightened by a confluence of external factors including pressure on margins, responding to real-time demand, requirements to use sustainable materials and others.
Many of these issues can be addressed by applying the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and related edge technologies in a systematic and incremental manner. Specifically, this will require more comprehensive data collection, reporting and analytics across the supply chain. Here we look at issues facing packaging plant managers and other personnel, and then show how the problems can be solved through intelligent implementation of IIoT solutions.