Tough technology helps keep cold chain operations from freezing up

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Tough technology helps keep cold chain operations from freezing up

Jim Dempsey

Some products absolutely must be kept at low temperatures while they are in transit and being stored. The science of maintaining low temperatures has been advanced so that products like foods and pharmaceuticals are kept at the correct temperature while in storage and transit or until they are ready to be consumed. However, those low temperatures are not always friendly to the people who handle those goods and extreme temperatures can adversely affect the electronic equipment they use. The effects of frigid temps on electronics can be detrimental to the equipment and if it fails, can cause disruption in the supply chain.

Regulations like the Food Safety Modernization Act  (FSMA) demands information about products be kept up to date even while they are being stored in chilled compartments. As food is transported, it must undergo real-time monitoring, tracking and reporting on internal temps, inventory management, and any number of other critical tasks, most of which require the use of some kind of communicating computing device. There’s no shortage of mobile products like smartphones, tablets, and laptops that under more normal conditions can be pressed into service and perform adequately. However, making use of consumer grade technology under adverse conditions presents issues for both the user and the equipment.

Marwan Mohey El Dien, CEO of Maryland Packaging uses his smartphone but explains, “It gets difficult because the warehouses will get very cold and make it tough to quickly type out an email, send a company wide message or even take notes on an issue I noticed with production. I've used gloves specialized for touchscreens, but you need to make sure they can really work well on mobile devices.” The construction of the device’s screen plays a part in the ability to work using gloves and in most cases enterprise-ready ruggedized tablets will perform better when used with gloves compared to consumer units.

Extreme temps can also affect the ability to use mobile units when moisture finds its way into devices that are not sealed against liquids and humidity. When a unit is carried from outdoors with normal temperatures and relatively high humidity into a refrigerated environment, moisture can condense inside the unit, which can make it difficult to read the screen. Juan Leal of OddToaster.com uses his consumer grade smartphone in his work and relates, “One day, after carrying and moving boxes in the freezer my phone went missing. I could not find it anywhere at home. Upon reaching work, I found the phone in the freezer. I apparently left it on a box the day before. After turning it on, I started seeing moisture building up inside the screen and camera lens.” Under types of challenging conditions condensation can even cause physical damage to electronic parts.

Real time communication is important to keeping product information updated and mobile operations rely on good connectivity. Although, cold storage and shipping environments are notoriously unfriendly to cellular connectivity. Vijay Goel of chefalytics lives with these restrictions and explains, “Our building is old and in an industrial area so broadband speeds are slow and expensive. Add thick walls, stainless steel all over the place, and heavy refrigerator doors and the signal is unreliable.” Tablets and laptops designed for use in inhospitable environments can perform better and provide connectivity because of their specially designed antennae, whereas consumer grade equipment simply isn’t designed to cope with these kinds of unfriendly conditions.

The combination of environmental conditions that make up the cold chain industry are necessities to the care and delivery of perishable foods as well as compliance with government regulations, but are unfriendly to standard mobile devices. Ruggedized enterprise-ready tablets and laptops are designed to withstand these conditions and perform efficiently, delivering low failure rates that mean less downtime and better supply chain performance.

For more information on the features and performance to consider in cold chain and other challenging work environments, read the whitepaper,  The True Cost of Failure.

Technology’s impact on your summer ice cream parlor

icecreamblog

Technology’s impact on your summer ice cream parlor

6 minute read

While consumers may spend their summer seeking exotic ice cream flavors—Lobster, Cheetos and Spruce Tip are whipped up, ready for the adventurous eater—savvy businesses are bringing on new technologies to help figure out things like what new flavors will sell. 

Just south of Cincinnati, across the Kentucky border, vegan and vegetarian ice cream and sandwich shop Piper’s Cafe is leveraging big data to keep up with its customers: “We are growing and we can't remember all of our customers by name and face any longer. I'm looking forward to seeing what patterns my new regular guests fall into and adapting," says co-owner Chip Atkins in a report from The Week. Cloud and mobile technology mean that ice cream shops and other small restaurants can take advantage of the kind of big data insights that large restaurant owners have been using to lower costs and boost operational efficiencies. 
 

How the restaurant industry is reading tech disruptions

Not all restaurant innovations come in the form of new flavors or food items. Some important breakthroughs arise as solutions to common problems plaguing restauranteurs—from high labor costs to declining traffic. How to use breakthroughs such as big data and other disruptive technologies dominated our conversations at the 2018 National Restaurant Association trade show. 

In a recent research study conducted by Panasonic, nearly four out of five respondents stated they believed competitors in their own industry will pull ahead if they do not adopt or invest in disruptive technology. Seven in ten said they felt companies outside their industry could disrupt them. 

And these ideas were more pronounced in the food service, hospitality and retail industries. These sectors are more likely than others to say disruptive technologies are critical to the future success of their companies.

Connected restaurants

Across all industries, three of the top five adopted disruptive technologies are cloud, IoT and robotics. Each of these technologies plays a role in the connected kitchen, where appliances all sync to the cloud, communicate over a network, can be managed remotely and even using predictive analytics. Spyce, a new restaurant in Boston, is built around a robotic kitchen, and relies on cloud and IoT. The robotic kitchen “wirelessly collects multiple orders from a bank of self-service menu kiosks, displays the names of the guests whose orders are being prepared, pipes the various ingredients from refrigerated hoppers into a wok to be cooked and tossed, and dumps the hot meal into a compostable bowl waiting on the counter below,” according to a review in Salon. 

Labor is one of the costliest elements of running a restaurant and can eat up as much as 40 percent of a restaurant’s gross revenue, according to estimates. Software that has the capacity to collect and analyze data will the connecting element of automated processes and are already making it possible for labor intensive industries across the board to run more efficiently. MaryPat Sullivan, chief nursing officer at Overlook Medical Center in Summit, New Jersey, told Healthcare IT News earlier this year that the hospital network was able to save $70 million on operational costs by successfully employing predictive analytics. Software programs such as Panasonic’s Clearview platform have helped franchise owners of some of the largest QSR chains grow at a faster rate than their corporate-owned counterparts that still operate on legacy software. These functionalities integrated with the automation capabilities of PanaCIM are already changing the landscape of kitchen and back office interoperability.

icecream infograph

Personalizing experiences

Last month, we wrote about how the hospitality and retail industry are turning to artificial intelligence to create an increasingly nuanced personal experience for their customers. Of all the industries polled in our research, 90 percent say personalization is important to the future success of their company. Furthermore, they believe that the first step is to simplify the customer experience. But there is also a divide about what personalizing the customer experience entails. According to 40 percent of respondents, “personalizing” means making it simpler for customers to engage. Only 20 percent interpret this as “being able to customize services and offerings” by using customer data analytics to predict and impact purchase behavior. 

Personalization in ordering has contributed to the widespread interest and adoption of kiosks in the restaurant industry. McDonalds see kiosks as part its digital growth accelerator that will expand choices for how customers order, pay and are served, according to its latest annual report. Similarly, Subway also announced it was planning to introduce kiosks. In Texas, a number of Dairy Queen restaurants are already reaping benefits of self-service kiosks. 

Brands that have been early adopters of kiosks have reported that the average check size is up to 30 percent higher than at the counter. These kiosks don’t just allow the restaurant to continually upsell through the entire ordering process, but customers are also given the opportunity to fully customize their order, which leads to an increasingly personalized experience.

Authors
Jeff Pinc - Director of Food Services at Panasonic

Inside next-gen manufacturing

next gen factory

Inside next-gen manufacturing

5 minutes

In mid-February, the National Association of Manufacturers kicked off a cross-country trip visiting plants in more than a half-dozen states. The trip started in Troy, Michigan at “Automation Alley.” 

Job growth from Michigan to Buffalo, NY

The trip began as the business of making things faces major changes. Today American manufacturers need to fill some 364,000 jobs, according to a report from Deloitte and NAM. Panasonic manufacturing jobs are among them. In Buffalo, New York, Panasonic is partnering with Tesla in the production of solar cells for roof tiles—a product that integrates high-efficiency photovoltaics with roofing materials—and we’re looking for next-gen workers.

According to the Deloitte/NAM report, over the next couple of years, the number of manufacturing jobs in this country is expected to climb to 3.5 million. What kind of jobs will they be?

Our findings show that most of these new jobs will be created by small to mid-size manufacturers. The majority of American manufacturers are considered “small,” with fewer than 500 employees, according the U.S. Census Bureau. Its data shows that in 2015, there were 251,774 firms in the sector and all but 3,813 were defined as small. 

Disruptive tech in manufacturing

When these manufacturers create jobs tomorrow, they’ll have titles like supply chain specialist, manufacturing execution system developer, electrical technician and analyst. These titles relate to changes brought on by everything from supply chain automation to advanced robotics to artificial intelligence (AI). A few years ago, consulting firm McKinsey identified AI, advanced robotics and IoT among two dozen disruptive technologies that would account for trillions of dollars in economic value. Panasonic is deeply engaged in the advancement of almost half of these technologies. That’s important because when you’re creating experiences, chances are, you’re going to need to stitch together many of them into an integrated solution. Our future is focused on finding ways to apply our disruptive tech expertise to make radically new experiences possible. 

Factory work is becoming a new experience. From Automation Alley in Feb., NAM CEO Jay Timmons talked about how innovation is changing work: “Some people may think ‘automation’ and ‘job creation’ are mutually exclusive. That’s simply not true. Innovation is expanding opportunities and what American workers can do."

Millennials bring new skills to manufacturing

Manufacturers must think about how disruptive technologies will change the way they do business, operate plants and train workers. Automation, for instance, means that a worker will handle more responsibilities and needs additional skills to fulfill them. Big Data skills, for instance, are important to advanced manufacturing. Panasonic’s award-winning PanaCIM is a manufacturing execution system that creates an ecosystem connecting disparate islands of data across an enterprise—production data, MRP/ERP and legacy systems. Understanding and applying such data is key to operating the system.  Millennials (often defined as those now aged 20-40) come to manufacturing with new skills like MES management, but experts say that's just the start. “Millennials have already started changing the manufacturing and supply chains -- and for the better," according to an IndustryWeek report.

In support of growing manufacturers, Panasonic has invested heavily in its vision of a new manufacturing landscape–one that supports companies regardless of size, product mix or skill level. For instance, it designed its MES Manufacturing Execution System software to optimize the supply chain as a full-blown package and as an easy-to-install express system for companies with limited infrastructure. Panasonic introduced pick-and-place equipment that addresses the need for smaller lot sizes and tighter control over work in process and scheduling. Additionally, the Panasonic cloud9 Innovation Center, just outside Chicago, is a comprehensive facility where manufacturers can try out new applications, speak with experts and explore production hardware and complementary technology. 

Learn more about disruptive technology and manufacturing. 

Authors
Faisal Pandit - President of Panasonic Factory Solutions Co. of America