Simon Ganley, managing director, Ganley Engineering

Over the past three decades I have been at the sharp end of process control. Mostly with multi-national manufacturers both in NZ and internationally.

This has involved a wide variety of applications in a large number of factories. I have made a lot of very useful contacts with a lot of very clever people. I have seen a lot of amazing solutions and have also seen a lot of dumb stupidity that has cost a lot of money.

So, what do the top players do with the new waves of technology becoming available because of quantum developments in computing, optics and machine control?

For a start they question everything. Nothing is off the table. They only buy the best equipment available with the lowest cost of ownership. Anything bought is thoroughly tested and dissected long before it gets anywhere near a production line.

They sell what they make for top dollar and have built their reputations on quality. They hate waste and they watch their costs.

A lot of them have process control sensors specifically developed for what they do with custom filters and algorithms. This enables them to go to places no-one has been before with consistently made new products.

And it enables us to build these new technologies into our new analysers and control sensors. It is a symbiotic world for us.

Now what they do and a lot of industry doesn’t is to control what they make to the top of the specification as they make it.

Probably the biggest cost to manufacturing is the price of energy. If someone is running a fluid bed drier, a tunnel oven, a fryer, a drum drier or anything that uses energy with no controls is probably over drying/ cooking and giving away enormous percentages of what they make.

In this age, that is dumb. We have seen companies have whole shipments rejected because the products were going rotten in the packaging. We have seen a lot of products emerging from baking and drying that the owners declared was at 7% moisture and when we put a moisture sensor on, showed most was at 4%.

That is a lot of giveaway and wasted power consumption.

Now one thing the top manufacturers don’t do, is reduce the whole food they make to crumbs in order to use some medieval device that provides meaningless numbers about weight loss in baked or dried crumbs.

A lot of food contains butter and oils. Chips, cereals and biscuits for instance.

An operator takes a sample after cooking when it is hot and evaporating whatever moisture is in it. They then grind it in a coffee grinder which introduces more energy into the sample and effectively evaporates most of the rest of the moisture as what they have is now crumbs.

 If you are making a product, then reducing it to crumbs makes an entirely new product. Why waste time and money doing that?

Incredibly a lot of factories still use a heat lamp balance and think the weight loss is caused by moisture. The weight loss is mostly from oils. Place a nob of butter or a spoon of oil under a heat lamp for several minutes and watch what happens.

Assuming the weight loss was from moisture, they set their production line  energy controls so they can waste a fortune in power and then give away percentages in product.

We have sorted out a lot of factories around the world and got them making serious money with minimal expense. Those devices have cost manufacturers millions over the years.

Top producers binned them years ago.

The next thing the top producers do is to realise that most on-site laboratories only serve to advise what was made badly some time ago.

For a fraction of the price, go on-line, in-line or at-line but the money is made in real-time and not from eight hours ago.

If modern factories need process labs to set their controls up, they now contract out. Labs are best for developing new products. There are top-line multi-component, multi-product analysers now available that sit beside a line which an operator can use to get instant results from several batch ovens or lines.

These measure whole food. Common sense says to measure what you make.

Pass this around. If you are making stuff, then question everything or ask for advice.  Maybe you will make sure you are doing well but there is a good chance you will start to make some serious income for the same amount of work. Go to

 www.ganleyengineering.co.nz and www.ndc.com to see how it works.