🇮🇸 How to optimize your breast meat value?

Press release from Marel

Innova ProFlow software automates order fulfillment

On the one hand, there are your customer orders; on the other your raw material, that is the breast meat produced by your deboning systems. How can you best match them? Marel has developed Innova ProFlow software to make your life easier and more profitable.

Using SensorX, IRIS Fillet Inspector and servo-operated SystemFlex Distributor conveyors, the grading, tracking and distribution of individual breast fillets on the belt is possible. There is even more added value when those individual products are given the best possible destinations. This is exactly what Innova ProFlow software does for you. It is a logistical concept, feeding multiple inline end processes based on weight and quality. At all times it achieves the best match between incoming raw material and production orders, while maximizing throughput and reducing giveaway.

What headaches does the production control operator have until now?

When you’re a production control operator trying to optimize performance, with every new order and every new flock you have to make a lot of decisions. The moment you start batching, you need to create production rules to send deboned breast meat of a specific weight and quality grade to the RoboBatcher to achieve the best process performance. You’d rather have a solution that does its own calculations and adjusts the equipment automatically. That’s where Innova ProFlow software comes in. You get one single point of control and don’t need to set every individual machine separately. You don’t even have to think about optimal weight distribution or know what raw material is coming in. ProFlow software also takes care of this for you. The system knows what is coming in, as SensorX and IRIS FI continuously measure the number, weight and quality of incoming fillets. ProFlow software processes the data and sends every single fillet to its best destination. With ProFlow, you no longer have to worry about the ‘how’ of an order, only the ‘what’; What do you want to make?

ProFlow achieves the best match between incoming raw material and production orders, while maximizing throughput and reducing giveaway.

Order-driven solution

Until now, experience and many manual operations are needed to run your process. You are constantly monitoring what is coming in, how to process it, and what is going out; How are my orders progressing? When do I start the next order? Using Innova ProFlow software, you only have to ‘drag’ an order into the order timeline on the computer screen to let the system decide how to fulfill the orders. The newly designed User Interface (UI) shows an overview of the flocks in the chilling tunnel and orders in the order timeline. It shows all scheduled orders, when they are processed and when they are expected to be ready. In this order timeline screen, you can choose from which flock(s) to produce the order. You can also choose to produce a certain quantity (e.g. 10,000 trays) or for a certain length of time (e.g. two hours until the next break).

All data together

Based on the order that the production control operator enters, the software makes decisions. Suppose you want to produce 600 gram [21.1 oz] trays from only A-quality fillets of between 180 and 220 g [6.3 and 7.7 oz] from slow-growing chicken. Before, you had to distribute the necessary weight and quality ranges to the different orders yourself. You had to make adjustments to the I-Cut 122 and RoboBatcher separately. With every new order, you had to reset each piece of equipment. That’s a thing of the past now. Instead, the ProFlow software pulls all data together. It sees the incoming raw material and calculates which weights and quality grades need to be used for each order to achieve the best performance. It sees which flocks are available to generate the fillets and produce the order. It sends every individual fillet to its best destination, adjusts all machine settings, and starts and stops the process automatically. The result is high throughput, minimal giveaway and optimum utilization.

Two Distributors, three streams

With two SystemFlex Distributors integrated into the conveyor line, there are three possible product streams. The first Distributor can take a certain weight range, or it can take all B-quality products out of the stream for a bulk process. The ‘main product stream’ can go to a RoboBatcher, doing fixed-weight batching, selecting an average breast fillet weight of 250 g [8.8 oz] to assemble 500 g [17.6 oz] trays. The second Distributor can redirect a third product stream, portioned products such as schnitzels, to be sliced by a SmartSplitter and batched with a Multihead Weigher. All the time, the ProFlow software looks for the best breast fillets for each product stream to minimize giveaway and assemble optimum product batches. The integration of an I-Cut 122 TrimSort in front of the Distributors can create extra value when creating fixed-weight packs, as it can resize heavy products for all three product streams to achieve lower giveaway.

Originally published on 19 December by Marel.

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