It’s a moment of enormous opportunity, with Industry 4.0 transforming the way businesses collect, process, and deploy data, and Maintenance 4.0 applying those tools and techniques to revolutionize asset management.

A strategic approach to Asset Performance Management (APM) helps you keep critical equipment and production lines up and running, using the mountains of operational data now available to help you track equipment performance, anticipate the need for maintenance, and prevent breakdowns before they occur. But even in steady economic times, and certainly in the midst of a global pandemic, the decision to embrace the new technology will always be guided by the bottom line: Will the cost of the new system be justified by the efficiencies and cost savings it delivers?

Infor’s Best Practice Guide, “Why your EAM strategy must evolve to increase food safety,” focuses on five specific, tangible benefits of APM, to help you make an informed decision on an approach that will soon be the price of entry for successful business operations in the 21st century.

There has never been a better opportunity for you to embrace technology that drives innovation. Transforming and evolving as an organization is now a requirement to thrive and protect continuity of business. Infor helps Lawson S3 customers drive digital transformation and ensure business continuity with Infor industry CloudSuites. Infor CloudSuite customers leverage improved automation and role-based security to tighten access to sensitive data, scale quickly and efficiently, and harness the power and responsiveness of Infor’s modern system architecture to stay ahead and compete.

Infor CloudSuites are built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the market leader for cloud-based infrastructure as a service and platform as a service for over 10 years. This best-in-class system architecture is purpose-built for innovation, providing you with industry-leading scalability and availability, integrated governance and control, and unparalleled extensibility to democratize data for end users.

Infor CloudSuites, including CloudSuite Healthcare, CloudSuite Corporate, and CloudSuite Public Sector, provide an easy path for Lawson S3 financials and global human resources customers to digitally evolve business operations. CloudSuites deliver industry-specific capabilities without extensive customizations or integrations. Infor’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) competitors struggle to tap into the latest advances in enterprise functionality with as little business disruption and as cost effectively as with our AWS tag team.

Since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing processes have undergone several revolutions characterized by ever-greater automation. Today, the fourth industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, takes advantage of big data and machine learning to drive smart, highly automated processes. A pretty familiar concept.

Less well understood, but equally momentous, has been a parallel evolution in asset maintenance. Maintenance 1.0 relied on highly-trained specialists to visually inspect machinery. Maintenance 2.0 gave humans instrumentation to measure how equipment was running, while Maintenance 3.0 used real-time monitoring to understand the condition of an asset systematically and programmatically. Now with the Internet of Things (IoT) collecting sensor data, Maintenance 4.0 sees that data captured in a data lake repository, and algorithms and analytics applied to better predict when a given asset will fail, and how to correct the problem—preventing a potential food safety issue.

Asset performance is key for food and beverage processors to reliably produce safe food at the lowest cost. This goes beyond only having the equipment available. Asset performance is one of three variables used to calculate the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)—the other two variables are availability and quality. In food and beverage processing, quality is primarily about food safety, which is non-negotiable. Studies show that a food safety issue leading to a recall in average costs $10 million. The associated brand damage can be unmeasurable.

The state of equipment and the behaviour of workers have a big impact on food safety. Eliminating food safety risks and risks to workers are the primary responsibilities of any food processing company. Numerous food safety issues caused by contaminations with extraneous material like metal coming from broken filling equipment, or grease or detergent remnants are reported to the FDA and RASFF every year. Cross contamination, pathogens, and faulty labeling are other possible reasons why food and beverage manufacturers must recall products

Many consumers are passionate about the quality of their food, the health implications, and the environmental footprint made by food manufacturers. To meet their shifting expectations, food and beverage manufacturers must speed product introductions and develop new offerings that reflect the changing views on what is fresh, healthy, and mindful—and technology can help. It’s not just taste, freshness, and convenience that drive food purchases today. Conscientious consumers also focus on health, wellness, and social issues as they shop for family meals. They take nutrition labels, visibility into suppliers, humane treatment of animals, and environmental sustainability into consideration when shopping for food. While these expectations put added pressure on food and beverage manufacturers, companies that turn to technology to help, should seize the opportunity. Meeting the demands of today’s socially aware consumers can be a valuable differentiator.

Restaurant and food services organizations have adapted their services in recent times by investing in cloud-based restaurant point of sale and its capacity to integrate across locations with emerging technology. A big trend within that has been in POS integrations with mobile and self-serve solutions that allow guests to manage their own orders. This is particularly pertinent in an era of social distancing. But even before that became central to how restaurant and food service organizations engage with guests, the modern restaurant guest sought out channels where they can manage the details of their orders themselves in favor of the traditional staff-operated POS terminal. That trend was driven by how culture and technology converged.

Self-directed ordering is particularly relevant now when minimizing contact is so important to feeling safe and secure when interacting with brands. The organizations that are winning right now are embracing that by giving up control over managing the details of an order and leaving it to those who know about those order details better than anyone – the guests themselves. What kinds of benefits does this trend represent for the restaurant and food service industries in this era of change? What does it mean for organizations ahead in the 2020s? Let’s take a look.

The food and beverage industry is ripe with complexities, and the journey from idea to commercialization is long and arduous for food technologists. New product ideas or packaging developments have to endure rigorous data collection, testing, and certifications to make it to consumer shelves—processes carried out by food technologists working with manual tools, creating a wide margin for potential error.

Excel and pen-and-paper methods are common ways to record data and make calculations regarding research and development, quality standards, raw supplies orders, and dozens of other variables associated with the manufacturing process. Luckily, the industry has seen an uptick in the adoption of digital transformation methodologies. Accessible, commodity-based technologies are making it easier to accurately record data and make mission-critical calculations.

Only a few generations ago, most people harvested vegetables from their backyard and bought meat from the local farm. This provided simple and direct traceability. Trust across one’s food supply was inherent. With food supply chains expanding, reduced food costs, and easier access to ingredients and ready-made meals, the time-consuming vegetable garden has become less common with food and beverage producers meeting most people’s needs.

Product information and safety regulations play a larger role in food production today. In the last decade we’ve seen innumerable initiatives to introduce healthier mass-produced food, like sugar-free beverages and ready-to-eat meals made with less salt. Regulators in many countries have enacted laws to enforce these changes. The FDA, EU, and local country legislation are driving more transparency in product labeling, especially when it comes to serving sizes, calories, daily value percentages, added sugars, and more.

In the past, creating product labeling information could be easily achieved. Suppliers provided their specifications, and food processors then calculated nutritional values and listed the allergens that needed to be printed on the product packaging. It was straightforward if you didn’t change suppliers.

Recent events have challenged restaurants and food services industries to be flexible, adaptive, and more aware that being able to anticipate what’s to come is a vital component for staying competitive in the present. It’s also taught the industry that that status quo and the legacy systems that prop up outdated assumptions work directly against those efforts. A movement towards digitalization that has been happening over the last few years and embraced by restaurant and food service industry leaders has helped businesses to build a solid foundation for success.

Cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and cloud technology for restaurants and food services deployed to all brand locations has helped organizations to address the seismic shift that the industry is facing right now. How has this technology done this? How do the challenges and successes of the present point the way to resilience in the future? Let’s take a look.

For years, food and beverage manufacturers have been concerned with short shelf life, inventory planning, and margin pressures. In today's competitive landscape, yesterday’s supply chains have had to adapt and change to respond to today’s consumer expectations of healthier choices, greater ingredient transparency, and the more options for online or e-commerce shopping.

This health and wellness trend isn't new. What’s new is the level of growth we’re seeing in the market for consumers that want a healthier lifestyle—and are in fact, demanding it from their food habits and purchases. Food and beverage manufacturers are doing their best to meet this trend with cleaner labels, more plant-based options, and more ethically sourced food. Both new product introductions and long-standing products in the market are being updated with healthier ingredients to replace preservatives, saturated fat, sugar, sodium, or genetically modified (GMO) ingredients.