Behind the Scenes: Plant-Ready by Design: Reliability, Sanitation and Serviceability

Interview Transcript

Jump to a section of interest:

• Introduction to PPO
• Focus on Sanitation in Design 
• Ensuring Effective Detection in Harsh Environments
• Customer Insights on System Usability
• Serviceability: Key Considerations for Maintenance
• Adapting Designs for Diverse Customer Needs
• Standardization vs. Flexibility in System Design

Introduction to PPO and Meat Processing Technology

Welcome to Behind the Scenes with PPO, a video series that offers a behind the curtain look at how meat processors collaborate with tech companies like PPO and why.

We’re joined today by Hernan Miguel, P&P Optica’s VP of Hardware Engineering and Production.

With over fifteen years of experience in engineering and product development and a background in mechatronics engineering, I can’t think of anyone better to help us explore the challenges of using high-tech solutions like PPO’s smart imaging system on the plant floor.

So let’s dive in to how PPO has made our systems plant ready. Welcome Hernan.

Thank you.

So, Hernan, when we say plant ready, it can mean a lot of things. But how has PPO specifically designed our equipment so it’s been so successful so far on the plant floor.

Focus on Sanitation in Equipment Design

So right off from the start, we basically, focused on sanitation and design for sanitation. So if you look at the design of our system, we’ve provided as much accessibility as we can, and our whole goal is to make sanitation as quickly and effective as possible for sanitation crews. From there, we move on to basically making sure our system is robust enough for all the types of environments that we work with. We’ve had customers that use high pressure, low flow rate pressure washing, high flow, low pressure, pressure washing, and, many different types of chemicals on our system. So basically, we our major focus is sanitation followed by serviceability and then making sure that we can provide the best signal possible for our machine learning algorithms to detect, identify, and reject foreign materials.

That’s a lot of complexity to have. So what are some of the if we let’s start with sanitation because that’s really important. So what are some of the specific things we’ve done to make it easy to sanitize? And maybe it’s parts we’ve picked or design flaws that we’ve corrected over time, but, like, how do we make it so easy to sanitize?

Yeah. So, basically, the first thing we looked is at accessibility to all the components. So you’ll see that all of the all of our conveyors have very large openings for access. We’ve spaced all of our components apart so we can clean through them.

Even our wire routing strategy in the wash down area is very carefully taken a look at so that we can prevent organic entrapment and allow for easy sanitation through there.

Beyond that, we’ve basically identified, many IP sixty-nine k-rated components to use in the wash down area, but we don’t trust those enough. So we do a lot of internal testing to make sure that they can actually withstand the environments that we see at our customers.

Ensuring Effective Detection in Harsh Environments

Got it. Okay. So we can handle sanitation. The most important job we have is detection. So how do we protect those incredibly, important parts that actually do detection and make sure that detection is as effective as possible while still with standing sanitation? What do we do there?

Yeah. That’s a great question. So, we use very sensitive electrical components and cameras, and our entire goal is to provide the best signal integrity to the software side of the system so they can make the best decisions on rejection, identifying and rejecting foreign materials. So how do we do that? Essentially, our cameras are enclosed in a enclosure that we designed ourselves, and we hook all that up to a cabinet dryer that injects low humidity air into the system. So if any water does get in, it immediately gets wicked up and basically cleaned away. Now in terms of the actual sanitation process itself, we use many different strategies to seal our enclosures, seal optical surfaces onto our enclosures, and then all we require from our customers is to just wipe them down in the morning as part of the pre-op procedure.

Got it. Okay. So you’re not an industry guy. Like, you come from you know, we talked about it when I started the video. So how did you and PPO learn from or where did you learn from to actually do this design, and you know how are you continuing to learn as time goes on?

Yes. It’s definitely been a very interesting learning journey.

We’ve leveraged over thirty years of experience from our partners, so we rely heavily on our partners that have been designing and delivering equipment for the food industry for many, many years. So there is a lot of learning that comes from them. There’s also a lot of learning that comes from our customers. So we we get quite a bit of feedback from our customers and that’s where on the engineering side we take in that feedback and basically prioritize what changes are gonna be the most impactful changes in terms of sanitation serviceability and even performance of the system. Yeah.

Customer Insights on System Usability

And when you’re talking about customers and and, you know, out in the field, what feedback do you hear from customers?Yeah. So, every customer is different. Every customer uses their system different from a sense of sanitation, maintenance, service, and even operations. So we’ve heard feedback starting from, hey, your system is actually quite easy to service.

We’ve put a lot of effort in making sure that all of our components are easily accessible. If you look at the design of our system, most components can be replaced within a few minutes if something were to happen. On the other hand, if there is something wrong on our system, we include a lot of feedback to our PLC and to our computers. So it allows operators on the floor to easily identify the root cause of the issue and basically get it fixed within a matter of minutes.

Some of the other feedback we’ve gotten is also on the sanitation side. A lot of our customers are really happy with how quickly they can clean our system, and we do include a lot of features on the sanitation side of things that helps improve that process, make that process faster. Good example is belt lifters. We have belt lifters on all our conveyors, allows lifting of the belts and then you can get into all the components underneath the belt and all the runners underneath that as well.

We also have a rinse and place system. So essentially, that that allows our customers to pre rinse our system before the sanitation crew comes in, and then that makes the sanitation process itself so much quicker and easier to clean and get those organics off of our system.

Serviceability: Key Considerations for Maintenance

Got it. Okay. So you mentioned something about serviceability, which I think is also really important in a plant. Right? And any high-tech company bringing equipment like this into a meat processing facility, It’s gotta have some concerns about is it gonna be okay with the challenges that it faces from a serviceability perspective. So you mentioned we’ve got, you know, parts that are easy to swap out. What else would you want a maintenance supervisor to know about our system coming into their facility?Yeah. So one of the biggest focuses we’ve done during our design is we put a lot of effort into making sure we use industry standard components. So as an example, we have an Allen Bradley PLC. We have Allen Bradley breakers. We have several components that are standard and very easy to source. We stock them here at PPO for next day delivery, but we also share all the information of those components with our customers. They can have their own inventory and be ready to go in case there is a critical failure in our system.

Beyond that, there are other things like filters that we replace in our system, and those are basically they take five minutes to replace, and again, they’re very easily sourceable.

Got it. Okay. And how does PPO typically work with our customers when it comes to maintenance and service?

Proactive Customer Support and Maintenance

So our customer success team does a really good job in making and and staying up to date with our customers. They monitor our systems almost on a daily basis or basically on a daily basis at this point, and they preschedule service visits to make sure that the system is being inspected for proper functionality, making sure all the parts are are intact essentially, making sure that we’re getting the right calibrations on the system and ultimately the performance that we need from the system. If they see something’s wrong, we’re usually the first ones to call the customer. The customer doesn’t call us. And that’s probably one of our biggest competitive advantages out there.

Yeah. Yeah. Certainly from a customer success perspective, it’s one of the things we love. Right?

Yeah. Is we can call and be like, hey. There’s a problem. And they go, really?

Okay.

And we’ve got parts on their way.

Adapting Designs for Diverse Customer Needs
Right. Exactly. That’s awesome. So what, you know, based on you’ve seen now twenty plus systems in the plant In different environments. What have you learned that you’re taking forward into our next system design?

Yeah.

Every customer is different. And what I mean by that is every customer has a system that operates in a different environment, different application.

They run our system differently, and the biggest learning we’ve had from there is, well, our our design has to be good enough to be robust and flexible enough to run all those applications under all those environments and really be able to not just withstand the environment, but keep its performance, stable after many, many years of running.

And the biggest learning there is we’ve integrated a lot of different changes in our design to make sure that, hey, we can survive in an environment that is three degrees, ten degrees, fifteen degrees. We can survive in a high temperature, high pressure wash down environment. We can survive pretty much any environment we’ve had.

We have customers and we have our systems with customers that are using our system for raw processing. We have our system also running in ready to eat areas, and those are two very different environments with two very different needs, and we’ve been very successful at both, at operating in both environments.

Standardization vs. Flexibility in System Design
You mentioned, Hernan, that we’re in RTE and in primary plants. We’re also in secondary and pet food plants. So those are all really different. Right? But we have one system. So what have we done to kinda standardize the system for all those environments? And then what do we allow in terms of flexibility for our customers?

Yep. So our system has been designed, from the ground up to survive in all these environments. So whether it’s primary, secondary processing, RTE, or pet food, we’re able to survive in those environments. So what have we actually done?

So from the ground up, we basically followed NAMI design guidelines Okay. And best industry practices to make sure that our system is basically acceptable and cleanable in all of these environments. And that has really allowed us to very easily go into all these applications, all these environments, and, we’ve basically we had a customer that told us, you’re gonna have to redesign the system for RTE, and they came back with no recommendations. Wow.

So we kept our current design. Wow.

So Can you give me some specific examples of why?

Like, what did we do? Is it A particular I don’t know. What do we do?

Yeah. So like I said, from the ground up, we design we design the system with sanitation in mind and hygienic design in mind. So for example, there are no flat surfaces in our system. All the water is, managed so that it drains to the floor, and we don’t allow for anything to pool anywhere in the system. All of our components, we prevent metal to metal contact to prevent organic entrapment, so we use spacers everywhere. We even use hygienic design screws with special seals to prevent organic entrapment in any of those areas. Something you don’t regularly see in equipment and food industry right now.

Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. So knowing that we’ve done all those things, so it’s super easy to move it from, say, RTE to primary and back and forth to pet food and secondary. If I’m a customer, what can I adapt in the system to fit into my specific plan?

Yep. So, most customers work with our engineering team so that we can figure out what is our customer’s plan to interface our system to the rest of their line.

Okay.

We do have some flexibility. We’ve had customers ask for, digital signals so they can run downstream and upstream equipment. Some customers have tied into our safety circuits. So, again, they can also tie in to the rest of their equipment.

Yeah. We’ve had customers request data signals for their SCADA implant factory systems, and that is that is a pretty normal ask for us. Additionally, we’ve changed conveyor lengths. We’ve changed reject stroke lengths, and we’ve done a lot of hardware customizations to make sure that the customer gets the solution that they’re looking for.

Awesome. So you can adapt to smaller format, bigger format product, for example, or to fitting into a bigger or smaller space to a certain extent just based on what their product looks like.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Very dependent on the application and the environment.

Okay. That’s amazing.

So with all this experience and all those learnings, what’s next for you, and what are you thinking about every day at PPU?
So we’re never done in the sense of system design. There’s always improvements to be made. We’re always getting feedback from the field. There’s always the next step in technology.

So one of the things that we’re looking at is, well, we know what we can do right now, but what is really the next step? What what extra added value can we provide for the customer?

Sanitation versus safety, that’s always a concern that we have. There’s always a balance between both of them. So we’re always exploring ways on how do we make our system easier to clean, even easier than now, but also make sure that we stay on top of safe safety and keep our system safe for operators.

Ultimately, we have the best solution in the market for hyperspectral imaging.

We’ve proven that we can operate it in many plants, around the world and in many different environments.

And, really, the next step is how do we keep expanding? How do we make our system even more reliable and easier to service? There’s always improvements to be done.

Well, I can’t wait to see what’s next. Thank you, Hernan, so much.

You’re welcome.

Don’t forget to check out our other videos in the Behind the Scenes series, including our in-depth interview with P&P Optica’s Olga Pawluczyk, our CEO, about why hyperspectral imaging is so effective at reducing foreign materials and heat processing. You can find the link to that video in the description below. See you next time.