Platform for the food and beverage industry
The current range of software that monitors production processes and records data is impressive. Yet these packages are not easily accepted by the industrial customer, who often still conveniently incorporates data into standard calculation sheets or even starts working with pen and paper. There is still the perception that such implementations are unnecessarily long, (too) invasive, not customer-oriented and therefore too expensive. These are all hurdles that CREONIS' MES program managed to overcome years ago. Wim Hendrickx, managing partner of the software developer from Herent, explains to us the depth and power of their software.
"CREONIS is a software company, created in 2006 as a spin-out from the international brewing group AB-Inbev," Hendrickx enthuses. The developer focuses primarily on companies in the food industry, for which he provides both custom development and implementation of Manufacturing Execution Systems, or MES for short. Anno 2021, many companies are still deprived of good insight into their own production process efficiency. "Especially in the food industry, quality and efficiency remain intimately intertwined, making the simultaneous monitoring of performance, material flows, energy balance, maintenance, quality control and personnel management an absolute necessity," says Hendrickx.
Creonis, partly because of his background in the brewing industry, has extensive experience with such batch-and-fill processes. "Our team is 11 strong, and includes both technically-programmatically oriented and hands-on people with a strong business background. This gives us the ability to quickly map all relevant parameters of a process (times, speeds, downtimes, pressures, temperatures ...), and correctly channel, interpret and process the data." With the current trend toward digitization, almost all devices can provide data. However, one often sees this data sitting unused on separate islands. It is then necessary to bring these data sources out of their isolation, and further integrate the released data into the system. Hendrickx: "Especially in the (legal) framework of food safety (including accurate tracking & tracing), it is necessary to be able to follow up and evaluate data in real-time as much as possible."
Flexible integration is an important asset here. In fact, the system is modularly configurable. Hendrickx: "Our implementations are always tailored to the customer. In doing so, we always strive for seamless integration into the existing system landscape and consolidate the existing data from other systems into one meaningful whole." The software developer is also strongly committed to mobile applications. On the production floor, data are still too often registered manually, even on paper, and have to be entered into the system later. Double work, in other words. Hendrickx: "We remedy this by offering the operators mobile applications of our solution, so that the data is entered once and is immediately available. Thanks to these mobile applications, the data collection is extremely efficient and one generally gets a lot of enthusiasm on the work floor."
