Wayne Labs has more than 30 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.
It is important for organizations to have a solid forecasting system in place for budgeting already, but even more so now with rising costs and inflation.
While we hope the COVID-19 pandemic is fading into the background, we still need to be concerned with labor shortages, transportation interruptions, political issues, weather extremes, and other peripheral circumstances that can still break critical links in the supply chain.
While there have been many success stories, blockchain technologies are still developing, so producers and processors will need to examine their needs carefully
Blockchain providers are working hard to gain the acceptance of food and beverage processors—no matter their size, and standard datasets like GS1 are helping to define the rules for consistent information handling.