Pyramid power: the basics of food automation

Prepared Foods, April, 1989 by George Hettich

Pyramid Power The basics of food automation

The food industry is faced with pressures unlike those it has faced in the past.

Once our future seemed assured through growth and the limitless ways our designers and technical people have added value to products by making them more convenient for the consumer. But today our consumer base is growing at only 1% per annum nationally. We have saturated the retail shelves with new products by adding enhancements and packaging alternatives to existing products.

Competition for share of stomach or appetite is the major battleground. But who is the competition? In addition to traditional domestic processors and away-from-home eating places, our industry is now entering into global competition, just as American heavy industry has faced in the past few years.

The mega-mergers of the recent past intensely urge profitable performance and general business health and swell the uncertainty of industry managers and workers, alike.

To cope with these pressures and remain the vital industry we are, we must operate differently in the future than we have in the past. We may take lesson from the healthy survivors of the "durables" group.

The heavy industries reacted with a sense of urgency. Remember, the engineers and executives of General Motors and other auto manufacturers were visiting Japan and viewing its industry for 15 years before they recognized the Japanese as competitors! By the time awareness had set in, the Americans were locked in a struggle for survival. Urgency replaced self-satisfaction and disbelief. Massive cut backs, delayering of management functions, worker wage concessions, selling of capital assets, government loans . . . the industry resorted to all sorts of short term measures to "stop the bleeding." WIll it take massive hemorrhage by many of the giants in our industry before we recognize our competition, before we assume the same sense of urgency that drove the heavy industries to action? What caused our industries to lose these markets?

They found it was cost and quality or, in a word, "value." The customer was casting a clear vote for the foreign product. The cost gap could not be closed with short term "cost saving tactics." As for quality, wishing to do better or drawing upon old reputations would not be enough. A plan was necessary.

How are these heavy industries behaving in the face of global competition? What methods are they using to reduce cost and improve the quality and value of their products? Which of these techniques are relevant to the food industry? And finally, how does the food industry compare in the application of these techniques? These and other questions are ours to explore.--G. Hettich

By and large, American heavy industry initially turned to "automation" as the answer to both the cost and quality problems. If they could depopulate the manufacturing process, they could conquer cost and quality with one shot with a "silver bullet."

Or so they reasoned.

GM, for instance, launched a series of high tech projects through the 70s and early 80s, culminating with "Project Saturn" in 1984. This project envisioned the opening of a small car plant in 1991 that would revolutionize the industry with its massive use of automation--at a price estimated at $5 billion. Since the initial splash, GM has said little except to announce intentions to scale back the program.

By the mid-80s, it had become clear that it would take more than automation and technology to survive and flourish. The NUMI Toyota-GM joint venture in Fremont, Calif. underscored this premise. The Fremont plant was a GM factory closed by GM because of high cost, low quality, and a "poor labor climate." Within a year under Japanese management, it became a low-cost, high-quality producer of automobiles with the same basic work force. It was also the least automated automobile factory in the United States.

The NUMI venture demonstrated the value of proper management, the total quality process, and asset management (Just-in-time Manufacturing)--essential ingredients in its success.

Are, then, automation and technology, inessential or even counterproductive?

To the contrary, automation and technology are powerful enhancements to a properly managed enterprise, but they are not silver bullets.

Back to the food industry global competition is here, and more is on the way. Both the management systems and automation technologies are applicable to all food processors--not just the big ones--in this practitioner's opinion. The press has widely reported the Total Quality Control (TQC) and management efforts of companies like Nabisco, Procter and Gamble, and Campbells.

Likewise, the business press has spread the success of factory-wide automation and new technology at Best Foods, Ore-Ida, and others.

To date, the food industry has succeeded best with "islands of automation," where automation efforts are localized to single areas of factories.

By the way, automation is not really new to the food industry. It was, and still is, widely applied to continuous food processes. In milling, sweetener/sugar manufacturing, and tomato paste processing we have model systems.