Smart manufacturing is empowering food and beverage manufacturers to transform their businesses and achieve significant value by leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud, and analytics solutions. As a recognised leader in smart manufacturing, AVEVA works with 23 of the top 25 food and beverage manufacturers to enable improvements across the asset and operations lifecycle, maximise return on capital investments, and increase profitability.
The pressures on the food and beverage/consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries are at an all-time high
Over the last decade, the number of product variations has surged along with the velocity of new product introductions.
The food production industry is the largest manufacturing sector in the world as well as in South Africa. It’s an industry that has to keep pace with an ever-expanding consumer base while facing increasingly complex challenges throughout its supply chain. On the sourcing side, South African farmers, like those elsewhere in the world, are struggling to keep pace with an ever-increasing demand for food. Simply increasing the output of current methods of agricultural production is not the solution – 86% of South Africa’s land area is already used for crops or grazing. If food production is to keep pace with demand and adapt for environmental change, sustainable agricultural practices must be widely adopted. That includes balancing the need for fuel (ethanol) and the need for food which leads to a more recent concern which is that of “food security” – SA’s ability to be self-sufficient and to guarantee the availability of nutritious food for all its citizens.
Drive Operational Excellence Across the Value Chain
Increase Operational Performance
- Transform manufacturing operations to improve profitability and yield while increasing flexibility.
- Drive higher levels of collaboration, agility, standardization and operational governance through smart manufacturing.
- Reduce costs and complexity with a model-driven MES/MOM software approach that enables deployment of standards-based operations across multiple sites.
Improve Asset Reliability and Performance
- Improve asset reliability and performance to reduce unplanned downtime and maximise return on existing investments.
- Defer or eliminate capital investments in new assets, while meeting increasing demand.
Ensure Consumer Traceability and Quality
- Avoid recalls and improve end-to-end quality and compliance for produced goods, including standards enforcement and product genealogy traceability.
- Support food safety compliance to preserve brand equity and shareholder value.
Increase Recipe and Formulation Agility
- Reduce time-to-market and costs associated with manufacturing new product introductions.
- Simplify the way you manage packaging material variations and label data as part of a recipe.
Challenges facing the F&B industry

Changing market needs
Customers want variety and variety also makes food manufacturers more competitive. This means greater production agility and shorter production runs – which in turn leads to the need for greater control which can only be achieved by turning data into actionable information in real time and for that information to be available to decision makers anywhere, any time and on any device.
- Historian – as well as Client and Online editions
- Intelligence
- Information Server
- Flow
- SmartGlance
- Wonderware Online
- Dream Report for Wonderware

Product traceability
More than in any other industry, F&B needs traceability throughout the supply chain for the protection of its customers and the ability to respond to anomalies quickly.
- MES/Quality
- QI Analyst
- InBatch
- Recipe Manager Plus
- Skelta BPM Workflow

Operations visibility
Operators need to be informed rather than confused. The right SCADA and HMI solutions together with increased machine intelligence is the way to get there.
- System Platform
- InTouch
- InTouch Machine Edition
- Alarm Advisor

Strict regulatory compliance
Consumers are protected by a growing mountain of legislation designed to protect their health and safety. Contravention of these regulations isn’t an option. For SA food producers, regulatory compliance is the key that opens more market doors in the U.S and Europe.
- MES/Quality
- Skelta BPM Workflow

Fragmented IT
Business IT and industrial IT were both invented for different reasons but ignoring a common goal. Today, these can be joined seamlessly to provide effective decision support throughout the organisation.
- Enterprise Integrator
- Flow
- Intelligence

Economic pressures and having to do more with less
Staying in business in this industry means being cleverer and more efficient than your competitor. One way of doing this is to empower your innovation with agile and cost-effective industrial automation and IT technologies.
- Historian
- MES Operations
- Intelligence
- SmartGlance
- Corporate Energy Management

Effective process control
Operations visibility into cause-and-effect scenarios, effective alarm management and operator awareness are top of the agenda for efficient processes.
- System Platform
- InTouch
- InTouch Access Anywhere
- MES/Operations

Compliance and quality
Continuous quality improvement lowers production costs while enforcing standard operating procedures leads to rapid issue resolution.
- MES/Quality
- QI Analyst
- Skelta BPM Workflow

Line and equipment performance management
This involves getting the most from the hardware, software and people involved in the production process.
- InTouch Machine Edition
- MES/Performance

Maintenance and uptime
Maintenance personnel can be far more effective if guided through diagnostic and maintenance procedures via portable devices.
- Avantis EAM
- IntelaTrac
Customer Stories