When they are implemented within your business as part of a cohesive process design, proper automation controls can vastly improve productivity, while also providing valuable opportunities to upgrade existing technologies proactively as your company evolves. Investing in process automation is crucial for keeping up with ongoing manufacturing trends, market activity and the influx of production innovations being made every year.

As a core component of process design, manufacturing automation can help your company achieve benchmark growth objectives and will greatly simplify future technological upgrades.

Everything That Upgraded Controls Influence

To determine if your company should pursue integrating new automation controls along your manufacturing lines, consider how effective your current control systems are at the floor-level. This includes:

• Communication and data controls
• Industrial control connections
• Robotics
• Power distribution
• Plain language control strategies
• Fiber optics products
• Wiring and cable
• Wireless programming capabilities
• DCS (distributed control system) and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) platforms
• Legacy control systems

Process automation relies on both the quality of your programming and on the automation control systems capabilities. With the wrong control configurations (outdated communications, poor programming, faulty connections, etc.), your company’s efficiency can be put at stake. For this reason, updating your current systems to today’s innovative standards is vital, and will help your company sustain any manufacturing edge it currently has in various industry marketplaces.

Process design encompasses engineering, equipment procurement and professional installation of automated controls.  Together they can help your company keep manufacturing costs low in the long term.

Once integrated, the automation systems and programming options you choose for your manufacturing line can pay for themselves by keeping total cost-of-ownership to a minimum.

The Best Way to Implement Effective Automation and Controls

All of these factors makes having a committed process design partner, who can handle all of these process tasks using their network of industry partners, so valuable. An optimal process design could set your brand apart in turbulent marketplaces, whereas poor procurement, installation and programming controls could cost your company any strategic advantages you once held within your industry.

You don’t have to go about finding and implementing the best process control automation systems for your business alone. It’s far more practical to reach out to an established industry partner; one trained to identify the ideal automation controls for your production operations. The following is a snapshot of what handing off process automation tasks to a dedicated partner team can do for your company:

• Significantly reduce the energy consumed in everyday process tasks, electric or otherwise
• Lower the carbon footprint of your production operations through more efficient, environmentally sound use of materials/waste
• Increase reliability of line equipment, controls and connectivity
• Optimize both software and hardware solutions used in manufacturing, while expanding upgrade capabilities for current and developing technologies
• Boost overall production with consistent quality and time-to-market

Processing Systems for Your Production’s Needs

How effectively your company processes products, from early design to distribution, is essentially what sets the stage for your market performance; this rings true for manufacturers in virtually any industry, for everything from food products and beverages to pharmaceutical goods.

Consumer recognized, desired products are the result of many decisions made during floor-level production. The largest of these decisions revolve around the way your company incorporates automation equipment to simplify processing. Do you know what your company needs, in terms of equipment and processing systems, to maximize impact for your brand?

As if identifying your exact engineering needs in an automation system (such as custom-engineered heating/cooling mechanisms, filling devices or measurement tools) wasn’t hard enough, you’ve also got to find solutions that make practical financial sense. What systems provide the biggest ROI for your products? How much will procuring the right automation equipment cost your company, in addition to installation and running costs? This is what makes hiring a dedicated, professional team of process automation/design specialists so important.

If the time has come to update or expand your company’s production operations and automated control capabilities, one of the smartest decisions you can make is handing off these tasks to an automation partner; a dedicated team with the contacts and knowledge to find the most affordable, custom-engineered process solutions for your business.

Contact Plan Automation here to learn more about our Process Design services.