Bush Brothers and Co. is a family-owned company best known for its baked beans. But the Knoxville, TN-based firm also serves up some pretty sophisticated data acquisition and downtime tracking technology since implementing a Parsec software application called TrakSYS. I talked recently with Operations Area Manager Anthony Peterson about the use of TrakSYS at Bush Brothers, and I’m happy to report that he’ll be on the program at The Automation Conference next May in Chicago. Here’s an edited version of Peterson describing how TrakSYS brings productivity and efficiency improvements at Bush Brothers’ plants.
• We needed to do a better job of tracking the downtime of our production and casing lines. Everything was in paper format. If a machine went down, the operator would mark it on a list. If we ever wanted to do any kind of research or trending, we’d have to take all that information, dig through it all, and then dump it into Excel spreadsheets to try to analyze it. That’s the only way we could track downtime or case efficiencies or anything like it.
