They say “Experience is the best teacher.” Well, that would certainly be the case for Matthew (Matt) Beier, who is now senior process engineer at CRB. Matt has two-and-a-half decades experience in food processing—everything from corn wet milling to pet food—and with process design and engineering. When his last workplace facility folded a while ago, he decided it was time to hop over the fence and go to work for an engineering/system integration/design/build company where he could use his past experience to help other food manufacturers with process design.
I interviewed Beier, who now heads up the food group at CRB, for an informal, short discussion about approaches to integrating any existing islands of automation in a food/beverage plant, which you can listen to here. If you have 20-40 year-old equipment in your facility that keeps on running, but its controls are aging or ancient, there is hope that you can keep what works and modernize it by pulling worthwhile information from it with the appropriate changes to instrumentation and controls.