Today’s food and beverage manufacturers are confronting a variety of formidable challenges, like how to improve product and production quality, meet strict food safety requirements and reduce unplanned downtime — all while managing the largely still unknown long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. To address these challenges head on and take advantage of the many opportunities spurred by technological innovations in the industry, food and beverage companies are realizing that they need to greatly accelerate the pace of digitalization.

Here are three statistics which may help illustrate this point:

1.   82% of companies have been impacted by unplanned downtime in the past 3 years.*
2.   Only 18% of organizations believe they are where they need to be on their digital industrial journey.*
3.   81% of respondents believe that digital tools can eliminate unplanned downtime.*

The entire process can be complex with so many technology players trying to penetrate the industry. Claims to offer tools that give businesses transparency to early accurate warnings plus guidance to avoid unplanned downtime and predict real-time quality are abundant. In these unprecedented times, with limited access to many producer sites, it can be difficult knowing how to deploy the best technology with the least amount of operational exposure to outsiders.

Choosing the Right Digitalization Approach 

For many companies, it can be a multifaceted decision to know what steps to take first, which technology to adopt and how digitalization will impact the bottom line. Some businesses may be uncertain which products best align with their comprehensive digitalization strategy or still have a need to create one. While others may have a wider range of digitalization goals. However, the bottom line for most is a pathway to capital expenditure avoidance and an avenue to boost overall enterprise performance and profits.

Consider AspenTech’s Asset Performance Management with Predictive Maintenance 

To reach their digitalization goals, food and beverage producers will need to seek out a partner who can provide unique solutions that enable them to optimize their assets to run safer, greener, longer and faster. At AspenTech, we offer a holistic approach with solutions ranging from process engineering design, manufacturing supply chain operating tools and asset performance management guidance.

As a starting point, Aspen Asset Performance Management (APM) software can be leveraged to help food and beverage manufacturers accomplish a range of goals with a rapid return on investment. APM encompasses a variety of solutions with analytics, helping companies monitor the equipment and the process, mitigate risk, provide a pathway to cloud connection and enterprise visualization, and create a collaborative workflow across the enterprise.

In the upcoming weeks, stay tuned for the continuation of this multi-blog series on digitalization.

In the meantime, download our recent white paper for more on accelerating digitalization for food and beverage companies.

* Independent market research specialist Vanson Bourne was commissioned by ServiceMax, a GET Digital company, to undertake the research which resulted in these key finding and many more. A total of 600 IT and field service decision makers with a responsibility for and involvement in field service management in their organization were interviewed from July to October 2017. All respondents came from organizations with 250 or more employees across the manufacturing, medical, oil and gas, energy and utilities, telecoms, and distribution, logistics and transport sectors, among others.