Driving Uptime and Efficiency in Food & Beverage

Climate control, energy efficiency, speed of operations, and worker safety are all top of mind for food & beverage, cold storage, and industrial companies that are trying to balance low labor availability with ever-changing customer demands. Achieving that balance isn’t easy, and it’s particularly onerous for companies whose operations are older and not up to speed with today’s technological standards.

In this Q&A, Serco’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Loading Dock Products, John Carroll, discusses the current distribution environment for food & beverage, cold storage, and industrial companies and shows how these organizations can use master control panels to streamline their operations, achieve high levels of climate control, and keep workers safe.

Q: What are food & beverage, cold storage, and industrial (auto, paper, glass, etc.) shippers focused on right now?

A: These companies are focused on climate control and energy efficiency. They need to be able to maintain the quality and safety of their inventories while also keeping the safety and wellbeing of their employees top of mind. These companies tend to use a lot of powered equipment in their warehouses and DCs. They really value the uptime and the low lifetime-ownership costs that this powered equipment affords them—versus using mechanical systems.

Q: Why is the loading dock such a critical aspect of their operations?

A: The environment at the dock is extremely critical for these companies, which must be able to keep their shipments protected from rain, snow, extreme heat, and other elements that could damage or spoil their products. These companies are also focused on achieving high throughput speeds and better energy efficiency while maintaining their cost structures (or, even lowering them).

Q: What type of equipment can these companies use to overcome these challenges?

A: A lot of them are buying powered loading dock equipment, vehicle restraints, and integrated controls. These products help with the ongoing demand for better energy efficiency and throughput, and all while enhancing worker safety. For the latter, we’re also seeing a bigger investment in dock-related fall protection products, including gates and barrier devices at the dock (if doors have to be left open). These companies are also using more data and metrics—generated by the equipment and software that they’ve deployed—to help drive uptime and efficiency.

Q: Can you explain what this looks like in a real-world setting?

A: Let’s say a company has a dock leveler, a vehicle restraint, and a dock door—none of which “talk” to or connect with one another. This creates real challenges for the company that has little control over how the vehicle restraint is used (or, if it’s even being used at all). With 25% of all industrial accidents taking place on the loading dock, this can create some significant safety issues for the food & beverage, cold storage, or industrial shipper. In other works, if people can just operate the dock leveler without the vehicle restraint being engaged, then a lot of them may just skip that step altogether (either intentionally or not). With the technology that’s available today, there’s really no excuse for this.

Q: How can food & beverage, cold storage and industrial companies centrally operate the various facets of their warehouses and DCs?

A: Our company actually pioneered the concept of putting all of the equipment at the dock into a single master control panel decades ago. And while controllers and components have evolved and morphed over the years, the overall functionality and the way users interact with those control panels hasn’t really changed over the last 25+ years. That’s where our new HMI Digital Master Control Panel really takes a generational leap forward. It features a human machine interface or “HMI,” which in essence is just a touchscreen that offers a lot of functionality that traditional “push button” control panels lack. First of all, the actual operation of the dock equipment becomes completely intuitive because the only thing that shows up on the screen is the next step that the user should take in operating the equipment. It won’t let you operate it out of sequence, which drives improvements in safety, efficiency, and speed. Push button control panels work well, but they’re just not as intuitive.

Q: What does that “intuition” like in cold chain and industrial shipping environments?

A: To put it simply, the worker walks up and knows exactly which button to push and when. Traditional panels typically only work in a certain sequence, but there may be some “misses” as the user tries to figure out which button to push first. To help, we’ve always incorporated a lot of text on the face of the panel, which, presumably, the operator would read and use to go through the sequence of events to get the dock equipment placed in the trailer (i.e., secure the trailer restraint, get the dock leveler into the trailer, open the door, etc). With the HMI Digital Master Control Panel, we’ve eliminated that text—a feature that speeds up new-user training because it’s very intuitive. It walks them through the steps as they perform the tasks. And because there’s no text to read, there no language barriers to work through. Dock workers are productive as soon as they come onboard.

Q: What else should companies know about how HMI Control Panel can help increase uptime while streamlining their operations?

A: There’s more to come this year. With our 4Sight Connect product (to be released mid-July 2019), users have dashboards that enable “live looks” across multiple docks and/or facilities right from their mobile phones or tablets. So, the manager who oversees 50 docks, or even 10, across a large physical area can open a screen on any dock individually, see the status of all the equipment, and know immediately whether the restraint is engaged, a door is open, or the leveler is deployed. Once it’s collected, that data can be transmitted to a cloud software platform (via a Bluetooth mesh network) for further analyzing, and to use for generating reports or sharing with others. It gives supervisors and managers a cockpit to go to—and to work from—across their entire operations.

Visit the Serco website to learn more about how HMI Digital Master Control Panels are helping food & beverage, cold storage, and industrial companies increase throughputs, streamline their operations, and create a safer work environment