Why production flexibility matters to Australian food and beverage manufacturers

Australian food and beverage manufacturers are producing more product variants in shorter runs as customer and retailer requirements change. Responding to those shifts can affect energy demand as well as production schedules.

Changes to recipes, packaging formats and production sequences can involve costly engineering work, particularly in plants with aging infrastructure and limited access to specialist skills. Manufacturers need to adapt without adding unnecessary downtime or losing visibility of plant performance.

Connecting automation, digital systems and energy management can help teams assess those decisions together. The aim is to make production more adaptable while maintaining reliability and understanding how each change affects resource use.

Australia’s food and grocery manufacturing sector generated $173 billion in turnover in 2023–24 and supported nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the Australian Food and Grocery Council’s State of Industry report. The sector’s scale makes the performance of its factories important to national manufacturing competitiveness.

The engineering work behind production changes

Automation is embedded across much of food and beverage production, but its flexibility varies between plants and production lines. A practical productivity opportunity is to reduce the effort required to modify existing systems.

In many plants, control logic remains tied to particular hardware or individual production lines. A recipe or packaging change can require engineers to rewrite logic, retest the application and recommission equipment before production resumes.

Repeated across a site or network, that work can delay product launches and make successful improvements difficult to replicate. Changes can also alter equipment loads and utility demand, so production performance needs to be considered alongside energy use.

Reuse proven applications where they fit

Open, software-defined automation separates control software from particular hardware implementations. This can allow manufacturers to reuse proven applications across compatible assets and sites, reducing the need to treat every production change as a separate engineering project.

Compatibility still matters. Existing equipment, interfaces and operating requirements need to be assessed, and reused applications still require appropriate testing and commissioning at each site.

Within those limits, the approach can reduce repetitive engineering and allow plants to update individual applications progressively while retaining equipment that continues to perform reliably.

Connect production decisions with energy performance

Flexible automation is one part of a wider change in how manufacturers manage production and energy. Connecting operational and energy data gives teams a clearer view of the trade-offs associated with a proposed change.

For example, a team assessing a recipe change could compare production time, quality and energy use per unit of saleable output before and after the change. It could also examine whether utility demand occurs at a different time or creates a higher peak load.

An open automation architecture can make relevant data available across systems. Industrial software can then bring together information from production, maintenance, utilities and energy systems so engineers can assess the wider facility, rather than one machine in isolation.

This is the practical role of energy technology: connecting energy management, automation and digital systems so improvements can be evaluated against productivity, reliability and energy-performance requirements.

Start with the changes that consume the most effort

Manufacturers can improve flexibility progressively, starting with the applications or lines that create the greatest engineering burden. Establish the baseline, identify the repeated work and assess where reusable applications could help.

Once an improvement has been tested, teams can evaluate its suitability for other lines and sites. Recording both the engineering effort and the operational result helps establish whether it is worth extending.

For manufacturers managing shorter production runs and tighter margins, the value lies in adapting existing technology more readily while understanding the energy consequences of each decision.

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