Dive Brief:
- Because proper documentation is at the heart of so many aspects of food and beverage manufacturing, automated documentation processing could save manufacturers significant time, money and hassle, Dan Reeve, director of sales and business development at Esker, wrote in Food Manufacturing.
- Optimizing documentation processes can directly impact profitability and maximize efficiency, boosting manufacturers' bottom line.
- Automation can improve manual documentation in a variety of ways: Reducing the risk of data entry errors, preventing production delays due to inefficiencies sending fax or email data, and reducing the likelihood that management will have to increase labor costs by hiring more staff during peak production periods.
Dive Insight:
Automation is becoming an increasingly common trend in food and beverage manufacturing, especially as companies have tried to become leaner and boost profitability in recent years. This can improve the efficiency of a wide range of production and management tasks in the industry, as it can complete work more quickly with fewer human errors and less employee oversight.
Automation software also often provides real-time data about sub-systems of a plant that a management team can review later to further improve their production methods and product quality. That data generation also fits into documentation, as automation software can collect data and even produce reports that management might need to present to executives or regulatory bodies.
But the main reason automated documentation processes are likely to become more popular in the coming years is the implementation of FSMA. With FSMA, the FDA shifted the responsibility of proving operations are safe from the inspectors to the manufacturers themselves. Manufacturers must provide extensive documentation of risk assessments, hazard analyses, safety plans and recall procedures to prove the safety of their plants and pass their inspections. Automation can help manufacturers produce this additional documentation without the need for additional labor and without spending too much of supervisors' time trying to collect and analyze the data.