ScanPlant is a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) from Scanvaegt, designed to fit the specific needs of the meat industry. The company's marketing coordinator, Kasper Granat, would like the concept to be seen by the food processing industry as the 'missing link' between the overall Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and the shop-floor data collection system.
While ERP-systems are mainly designed to provide companies with financial control, the ScanPlant system is designed to provide meat processing companies with reliable, real-time and accurate data on the shop-floor operation.
"The concept is a basically a business connection between plant systems," he told FoodProductiondaily.com "It can take orders from an ERP system and turn it into a shop floor cooperation. It allows you to control your production line."
According to Granat, this is because the ScanPlant system can handle all the processes associated with packing and labelling, undertake an advanced analysis of trends and relations from production data and monitor overall performance.
In addition, the system can also track and trace products along the supply chain, and support quality control concepts such as HACCP. It can also control ingredients and recipe versions, and provide reports on all production processes.
But what makes the concept especially attractive to food manufacturers is the fact that it is built in modules. This means that a processor can choose to include some aspects of the system while disposing of others.
"The ScanPlant system can be tailored for an entire plan, or just for one terminal," said Granat. "And you can coordinate the system with other programmes. Processors that haven't installed Scanvaegt equipment can also use the system."
In addition, Granat believes that many meat processing companies continue to operate with fragmented, inaccurate and non-integrated shop-floor control systems. With traceability legislation coming up, the need to implement a fully integrated and accurate control and manufacturing system will soon be a legal requirement. ScanPlant can help manufacturers meet these requirements.
"Traceability is now a key concern," he said. "Cows that are taken to the slaughterhouse after 22 weeks have a passport, and these can be scanned into the ScanPlant system. If the passports do not match or if there is a problem, the system makes sure that the animals will not get into the plant."
The need for complete traceability comes partly from growing concern over food safety, and partly from the fact that the meat supply chain has become far more complicated in recent years. Slaughterhouses used to deliver their products directly to retailers; now they deliver them to distribution plants.
Granat says that one of the roles of ScanPlant is to ensure that the right meat goes to the correct retailer. "The idea is that the system collects information from all the processes involved, and that all this data is presented only when it is needed."
As a result, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) such as Scanvaegt's ScanPlant are increasingly being seen as the answer to improving both product traceability and plant efficiency. There has however been a degree of uncertainty over what precisely the concept of MES means.
"It has meant a lot of things - tracing and tracking, product specification - but developments last year have helped to define the concept," said Matthew Holland, MES product manager for Siemens UK.
"The ISA S95 standard states that in broad terms, MES is the integration between business systems and plant control systems. As you can imagine, the gap between business systems and plant operations in the food industry has varied from small to large."
Holland stresses that MES is in its early days, and that the importance of the concept is that it recognises the interconnectedness of the food industry. It suggests that closer collaboration between every aspect of the food supply chain is inevitable. There has historically been a big gap in the food industry between business systems and plant operation systems, but Holland believes that things are moving in the right direction.
"In general, IT and finance have been very close. There has also been a lot of expenditure on business systems in recent years, which was carried out to cope with the boom of business to business transactions a couple of years back. Now manufacturing is getting its act together with suppliers."
Scanvaegt plans to launch the ScanPlant system at IFFA 2004 in Frankfurt, Germany.