The near future of poultry processing

The world of IT technologies changes fast and offers almost endless opportunities today. Marel uses these technologies and makes them part of its innovations to simplify your life as a processor in an increasingly complex process, increase output and yield and reduce dependence on operators.

Connected machines

Of course you will always want to improve your processes.  A way of doing this is to get your machines connected, a form of IoT. They’re already smart machines in a ‘stand-alone’ situation.  By connecting them, synergy will be even smarter. All machines will have an internet-connector to communicate with each other and with the cloud. Data collected from connected machines needs to come together in a central place, in the control room or in a cloud environment, so you can make decisions based on facts much faster than ever before.

1. Connection to the cloud keeps your line running

Connecting your equipment to the cloud will bring many benefits. If every second of line standstill counts, cloud analytics can inform you timely of issues, to prevent future standstills. Based on this information, you can improve your processes and increase your yield. That’s because we can add our specific Marel poultry knowledge to this information and make it available to you.

When your line stops and you need Marel’s help, having technical data in the cloud will make it much easier for our service department to remedy the problem. You don’t have to wait anymore for an engineer or product specialist. Repairing and restarting the equipment can be done faster remotely and digitally.
With every intervention, Marel’s algorithms and insights will become smarter so that we can keep on improving our service to you. Getting your equipment connected to the cloud is therefore a big advantage for you.

2. Machine connectivity allows for better choices in the value chain

Optimizing planning and production will benefit greatly from connected machines. It’s like an expanded version of Innova PDS distribution software allowing production process management to make the right choices. You’ll know exactly how to best match raw material to incoming customer orders, while taking all food safety and traceability principles into consideration.

Machine connectivity will allow you to measure and control all kinds of process characteristics such as broiler growth at the farm, temperatures during transport, waiting times in the lairage, air humidity in the factory, etc. In such a data-driven environment, you can tell the machines in the line about the characteristics of the coming flock, such as an overall light weight. All settings will then adjust automatically to those set in the memory for light flocks. All sensors, cameras and weighers in the line will already have informed the equipment that a light flock is about to arrive.

Safe and secure data

Marel is your trusted and transparent partner when it comes to having data available in the cloud.  Marel will configure the cloud environment together with you, so you can be sure your machines will only transmit data for which you have given permission. The trusted secure cloud environment complies with all privacy and security regulations such as GDPR.

Alerts and auto-recovery

In a near future, you will have an enormous amount of valuable data at your fingertips. While you may not want to review data graphs daily, you would want to be alerted if the performance of a unit continues to drop below a minimum standard that has been set. Eventually, even that won’t be necessary, as we see in our vision being able to provide an ‘auto-recovery tool’ to make your process flow even smoother.