Food & Beverage Asia June/July 2022

54
FIRST LOOKS
New Emerson compact
controllers increase ROI
for machine builders
Emerson has announced the release
of its PACSystems RSTi-EP CPE 200
programmable automation controllers
(PAC). This new family of compact PACs
helps original equipment manufacturers
(OEM) meet customer requirements
by minimising the need for specialised
software engineering talent. CPE 200
controllers will deliver large programmable
logic controller (PLC) capability in a small,
cost-effective, IIoT-ready form factor.
To stay competitive, today’s OEM machine
builders must provide equipment that is
ready to support analytics and give end
users competitive advantage through
increased efficiency, speed and quality.
However, as builders develop innovative
solutions for material handling, life
sciences and more, they can struggle to
program and deliver machine control
systems on time and within budget with
the performance, security and flexible
connectivity customers require. The CPE
200 series solves these problems with
security-by-design, open programming
and open communications built in to
simplify connectivity to external analytics
software platforms while reducing cost
and complexity for OEMs and end users.
“Gaining competitive edge in today’s
marketplace means having the flexibility
to connect to the wide array of equipment
end users employ as part of their
proprietary processes, and supporting
secure, open connectivity to allow easy
access to on-premises and cloud-hosted
equipment, with automated alerts sent
to the kitchen staff and maintenance
personnel in the event of any deviations".
Adarsh Kumar, CEO, TagBox, said in a
statement: "All organisations dealing with
perishable foods need to be additionally
vigilant about the temperature conditions
of raw material and finished goods. For
kitchens, retail stores or warehouses,
companies are still reliant on local staff to
monitor temperature of chillers, freezers
or cold rooms manually and record it in a
register for audit purposes. This method
is prone to manual errors, data recording
gaps, data loss, or worse, data tampering.
Any quality-driven organisation should be
aiming to get automated, central controlanalytics
platforms,” said Jeff Householder,
president of Emerson’s machine automation
solutions business. “The CPE 200 series
controllers take advantage of Emerson’s
cybersecure-by-design architecture,
common programming capabilities, and
IIoT readiness to provide options currently
missing in legacy compact PLCs.”
The controllers offer open communications
through native, pre-licensed support
for OPC UA Secure and other common
industrial protocols for flexible connectivity
over high-speed Gigabit Ethernet. IEC
61131 programming languages and C,
help engineers write and run algorithms
that enable production strategies and
advanced automation technologies. ■
Rebel Foods deploys real-time cold chain
monitoring system from TAGBOX
TagBox has announced that it is providing
its AssetLens solution to Rebel Foods
for real-time temperature, door-open
and power consumption monitoring.
Uday Mahajan, senior vice-president,
engineering at Rebel Foods, said: "At Rebel
Foods we are committed to providing
our customers with a safe, consistent
and high-quality experience. A critical
element of this is maintaining all our SKUs
at the correct temperature. This is also
mandated by FSSAI, which requires us to
monitor and log the temperature of our
cold storage equipment once per day.
With Tagbox, we are able to eliminate this
manual process and achieve real-time
accurate temperature monitoring of our
tower visibility of every cold chain
asset in their portfolio. Rebel Foods has
been one such organisation and we
are excited to deploy our cold storage
monitoring system in their kitchens."
TagBox's AssetLens platform has
in-built features like live temperature
compliance score, real-time alarms
for temperature excursions, asset
on/off status and abnormal dooropen
count or duration. Additionally,
AssetLens provides analytics and
reporting modules that identify
systemic failures like high energy
consumption of assets, which could be
predictive signals for asset malfunction
or store SOP non-compliance. ■
FOOD & BEVERAGE ASIA JUNE / JULY 2022