Unless you operate a brand-new state-of-the-art plant, you probably have a facility with a mish-mash of aging processing and packaging equipment with various vintages of network and application software support—maybe several areas requiring manual labor. But even a brand-new plant today is tomorrow’s aging facility, eventually needing equipment and software updates to keep it running with minimal downtime, peak efficiency and consistent product quality.
For older facilities, knowing where and what to automate—what your priorities should be—is important to helping you stay competitive now and in the future. For those with new plants, it’s never too late to plan your future goals. In this article, we consider how to know when, where and what to automate in an older facility. Of course, the answers to these questions won’t be the same for every plant.