Using Controls Standards to Accelerate Continuous Improvement Initiatives (GFT-730A)

Packaging has become the center of product diversification strategies for many food, beverage and consumer goods companies. As product marketers have driven greater variety and complexity into the SKUs that are manufactured, the increased difficulty of maintaining efficiencies cannot be overstated. Even as a growing variety of analytical approaches such as Six Sigma, OEE and Lean address the need for information to further tune processes and increase efficiency, the effectiveness of these approaches is limited by the ability of producers to extract actionable data from their equipment. It is therefore critical to enable the integration of equipment to information systems—and to maximize the usefulness of that data once it has made the leap from machine to metric!