Jeff Russell is Supply Chain Ops Manager-Factory Floor Automation at PepsiCo. He’s knee-deep in what he calls “a data system pilot” at one of the PepsiCo plants, and network connectivity is very much on his mind.
“One of the things we quickly realized is how much work we need to do on our infrastructure before we can get better with data, analysis of bottlenecks, and things of that nature,” says Russell. “Where I see the biggest amount of effort being put right now—not just at PepsiCo but generally--is developing network standards that will allow plants and machines to communicate with one another. What’s driving this is the need for data capture, flow, and transmission to be automated from the plant floor up to the MES layer, and we’re finding that in order to handle that added traffic load, our networks need to be upgraded.
“Complicating it to some extent is that our machines are increasingly modern and sophisticated, so there’s more data exchange going on between machines and the MES layer. So I’m seeing a push to upgrade our factory floor networks such that they can connect with our enterprise networks in a secure way. The factory floor automation engineering group and operations group are collaborating closely with the PepsiCo IT department to try and make that happen".
