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Plant Assessments

Help F&B manufacturers improve processes and reduce production costs – from power and automation to digital readiness via a consultative approach or assessments – led by domain experts in a collaborative / co-creation manner.

Through our Plant Assessment process we discover and unlock value by means of a structured approach and a comprehensive on-site assessment. It covers all aspects of your production processes from power to automation and digitalization and helps ensure safety, reduce your production costs, increase your productivity as well as flexibility and reliability of your assets.

With our deep industry knowledge and automation expertise, we understand the needs of our customers and enable them to lead through safer, more productive and energy efficient operations. Moreover, with our portfolio of integrated automation solutions, combined with our suite of ABB Ability digital applications, lifecycle services and AI, we are driving the evolution towards more autonomous operations.

Do you want to know how ABB helps F&B manufacturers to improve processes and reduce production costs?

Talk to us

The F&B industry is facing:

Increasing pressure from competition
Disruptive new technologies (IoT)
Sustainability-sensitive consumers
Preference for locally produced food
Health-sensitive consumers
Demand for more variants
Disruption in retail (home delivery)

Continuous as well as disruptive improvements in:

Safety & quality
Energy & sustainability
Cost
Productivity
Flexibility & capacity
Asset reliability
Compliance
Time to market
Business models

A joint journey to identify and unlock value:

Site assessment
Benchmarking
Digital maturity
Proposal of measures & solutions
Quantification of the value (ROI)
Business cases & roadmaps
Along value steps & value levers

We offer:

Process & domain expertise
Benchmark data from various F&B subsegments
Experience from 50+ assessments
Advanced digital technologies & hardware

Typical proven return: 20% OEE improvement and 10-20% cost reduction (energy, maintenance, etc.)

Our approach

What is the scope?

What is the value?

What will you get?

How do we do it?

Depending on your specific needs and focus, we offer holistic assessments or assessments for the following specific focus areas:

Digitalization: Focuses on digital solutions to unlock value and to increase competitiveness. The maturity level and potential are assessed along the value chain and functional areas focusing on digital & data strategy, connectivity, system integration, data & insight visualization, process transparency, predictive maintenance and processes and cognitive capabilities to autonomously operate your production processes.

Energy: Focuses on energy efficiency and sustainability covering power supply & generation, renewables, grid independence, power quality & protection, low & medium voltage electrical systems, refrigeration, compressed air, heat & steam generation, HVAC system, water system, process chiller system and control systems

Automation: Focuses on plant automation improvements that help to achieve better personnel health and reduce safety risks while increasing production line speed and capacity as well as improve product quality and consistency. The Automation Assessment can help you achieve enhanced traceability, process visibility and improve your OEE and operational efficiencies, but also help to adapt to new production lines.

Process: Focuses on plant process improvements and helps identify key areas to improve and understand how to ameliorate operational performance. Our domain experts involve the whole supply chain of your plant: from raw material to final product, including digital, water, utility processes, electrification systems, power generation and renewables, power quality, energy efficiency, process improvements, automation and robotics.

Holistic: The holistic plant assessment provides companies with the ideal opportunity to combat some of the most common industry challenges: from power quality issues, productivity and costs. Focus areas include:
- Improving energy efficiency & productivity
- Increasing resource efficiency
- Delivering automated real-time quality control
- Extending equipment life & performance
- Safeguarding of products and personnel
- Delivering greater process flexibility & output consistency

The structured Plant Assessment approach analyzes the value potential along your value chain and functional areas as well as along various value levers using benchmarks and best practices in the industry.
Specific solutions are derived from the identified value potential in the different value steps and functional areas.
For high potential solutions, we perform a detailed cost/benefit analysis together with out domain and solution specialists and prepare business cases.
We then jointly review the proposed solutions, their ROI and implementation roadmap to prioritize and focus on the top few solutions with the highest value impact and strategic fit to your business priorities.

Once the assessment is finished, the information gathered will be analyzed, condensed into actions and linked to relevant opportunities for improvement.
A detailed report will be generated that will include a cost/benefit estimate for different areas including yearly savings on proposed solutions. This report is based on an as-is-picture (fingerprint) and a target picture (benchmark) and presents your ways to ensure you can remain competitive.

^{A structured process to unlock value}

Our consultative approach is a journey, and the intention is to create a commitment for achieving the proposed solutions and benefits that were received in the report. The goal of the Plant Assessments is all about closing the gaps with domain expertise, solution and implementation. We will be your partner for the continuous improvement process.

^{Continuous Improvement Process}

Typical saving examples:

Manufacturing digitalization and MES solutions lead to better productivity and asset utilization of 5 % and a pay back of 1.2 years.
Active voltage conditioning and power factor solution will actively optimize undervoltage events and finally break downs in filling & packaging lines. This led to increase of productivity by of 10% and a pay back of 1 year.
Optimization of refrigeration plants, automation upgrade (change in control philosophy), high efficiency speed-drive technology, multi transformers, harmonics. This led to savings of 10% of the electrical usage for the refrigeration plant and a pay back of 1.5 years.
Robotics solutions for end of line application or packaging applications which led to increase of productivity by 5 % and a payback under 2 years.

We employ a structured approach to assess your site split into four main phases:

1. Fingerprint:	Starting with a management alignment meeting to agree on the scope and focus, we conduct a comprehensive on-site (optionally online) assessment covering the whole production process as well as quality, maintenance, energy and digitalization. This typically takes 2 to 5 full days. Depending on your focus, we can also do deep-dive assessments focusing only on digitalization, energy, automation or process improvements.
2. Design:	In the second phase we analyze all collected information together with process and solution experts from our various businesses to identify solutions to unlock value. For the solutions with the highest value potential we quantify the impact and expected cost and draft an implementation roadmap.
3. Implement:	At the beginning of the third phase we jointly review the business cases and short-list high value potential projects for implementation. These projects are then implemented in project teams.
4. Evolve & Sustain:	To ensure continuous value and improvement, ABB offers so-called ‘Collaborative Operations’ service that connects people at your sites with ABB to jointly make your operations more profitable