Today’s Connected Plant: A Unified Machine for Making Food
A concept by a 20th century architect points toward today’s digital transformation—bringing all systems in a plant together as a single integrated tool.
In 1927 Le Corbusier, a Bauhaus period French architect, authored a landmark book entitled in English, "Towards an Architecture." In it he asserted that a house is a “machine for living in.” While that may sound not very human, his intent was to show that a house is a tool that we use to live and function—just as a chair is a tool to allow us to sit, or a drill to make holes. With all the smart systems in today’s modern house controlled by your PC, tablet or smartphone, Corbusier’s concept, I think, has been realized way beyond his dreams. Today, we control our connected house to do our bidding!
Like Corbusier’s concept of a house as a tool, today’s modern food plant is—or can be—a well-connected, digitally transformed machine that pulls together process, building, energy, manufacturing and enterprise control systems into a single integrated, well-oiled tool for making food or beverages. Processors are realizing that to be competitive, they need all the information they can get about their inputs (ingredients, energy, utilities, etc.), process, product quality, food safety and output(s). Extending digital transformation to accommodate all these systems and integrate their data into actionable information is what turns the whole plant into a single, competitive too.