Improve Product Changeovers at Your Seafood Packing Plant

Ensuring seafood product safety while increasing plant productivity isn’t a zero-sum situation. There are methods you can use to remain compliant with the requirements of the FDA’s Seafood HACCP guidelines while improving product changeovers and performing the necessary sanitation protocols with less downtime.

Any changeover will require a planned process that includes all the necessary steps to start producing and packing another seafood product. A typical changeover will require sanitizing the entire line to start portioning and packing a new batch of products.

It’s often a linear, sequential process where you can proactively start the changeover upstream before the previous batch completes. How you manage these events will determine the line’s overall productivity but will also affect the efficiency of your labor utilization, your production costs, and your yield margins.

Follow these tips to improve your product changeovers and ensure a fast, accurate, and consistent process.

Shorten Production Downtimes with Improved Product Changeover Planning, Control, and Measurement

One of the biggest challenges for workers and supervisors is knowing when to start a product changeover. If the timing is off, you may end up with workers not being productive while they wait for the line’s new batch of raw materials, updated packing instructions, and product-specific labeling information to be loaded.

Information gathered from accurately measuring the yield will provide better planning & control for changeover times.

With a highly perishable product like seafood, maintaining the safety and quality of the product requires immediate processing. Due to the associated risks, organizations may defer the start of a changeover to protect the raw material until everything on the line is prepared to handle that batch.

With improved planning, control, and measurement of a production run, seafood processors can initiate a changeover immediately after finishing a batch. Here are two ways that MARCO can help streamline the process.

Tracking Mass Balance During Seafood Processing and Packing

Whether processing seafood for ready-to-eat meals or producing raw fillets, you can track the entire mass balance of your yield through different production sequences with MARCO’s solutions.

Such a system would consist of:

• Positive or takeaway scales - Raw material intake may require positive weighing while portioning is more efficient with a takeaway scale solution
• Yield control software - Our Yield Control Module (YCM) tracks each product while recording changes to your yield levels during different processing sequences
• Data exchange - The interoperability of your production floor data with your wider business and resource management solutions enables better planning

Planning and Executing Improved Changeovers Backed by Data

With consistent monitoring of how much mass balance of raw material it takes to process during every production run, it then becomes a predictable pattern. Depending on how much information is required, you can start a new product sequence within a few seconds.

As you are tracking the weight at every stage, the system helps to identify bottlenecks in the sequence that may increase changeover times. Supervisors can take corrective actions and start shortening execution times using data to inform the entire workforce.

To get everyone working off the same playbook, you can:

• Deploy Production Data Display screens - This helps to inform everyone on the production floor when the time for a changeover will begin using color displays and pre-defined prompts
• Verify QC compliance - Supervisors can capture quality checks during the changeover process for each element in real-time on a mobile device
• Track individual performance - Each step taken to improve a specific sequence will rely on knowing the performance of the workers involved

Shorten Changeover Times for Seafood Packing and Processing with MARCO’s Productivity Solutions

MARCO can improve the product changeover process with better labor utilization and knowing exactly when to initiate the process. To ensure seafood products are safe for consumption, creating an audit trail allows you to demonstrate compliance with CGMPs. Management can ensure each element is signed off before commencing the next sequence of production.

Along with accurate information from each weighing transaction, you can monitor your raw material through all stages and prepare everyone for the next product coming down the line.

You can learn more about MARCO’s food processing and weighing solutions in this eBook, or contact one of our experts to discuss your application here.