Balancing Automation with Quality

Balancing Automation with Quality

Automation plays an essential role for increasing consistency and efficiency in products and production. The actual appearance or perception of once an artisanal look might then be lost. In areas where skilled employees are becoming rare and cost of labour are increasing it can be the only way out to keep offering affordable products to customers in a consistent way. One way of looking at quality is consistency: as long as it has the same outcome it can be considered a quality product; the consumer knows exactly what to expect.

For bakers this is not enough: taste, texture, aromas they all need to be on point as well (or a close as we can get to our satisfaction). It is therefore good to start the scale up process with a few question such as:

•           What is critical for my product quality from an ingredient perspective? (e.g. butter or eggs or a certain emulsifier or perhaps even a hydrocolloid from a certain supplier)
•           What is critical for my product quality from a processing point of view? (is density before or after depositing, the layering technique and/ or number of layers used)
•           What will happen if we change process parameters (proofing conditions, baking, cooling etc)
•           Etc

In marketing and management consulting the technique of Simon Sinek is used very frequently:

1.              What
2.              Why
3.              How

 With asking roughly 5 times these questions around the same topic, you can start writing clearly some potential challenges to overcome, and likely you’ve written the problem now so clearly you’ve solve 75% already.

Cutting our product and process in smaller pieces and identifying its key critical success factors, we can search for solutions that either fullfill our desires (thus automation is an option) or don’t (then consider to that part manually). In the past often it was chosen to go on despite suboptimal options and then degrade products in appearance, texture, taste or quality.

Overcoming this requires individuals to come of their functional ‘island’ and work together to a holistic approach with technicians, operators, process and r&d engineers.

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