Ann: Nestle announced as a new Buddy Ohm customer, page-61

Tier one FMCG’s remain competitive by minimising costs. They do this by being quicker, more efficient and have very sophisticated real-time monitoring systems.

Tier one FFMG’s are focused on maintaining quality and maintaining volume for the present demand.

An example is a glass bottle manufacturing multinational company with a plant in Melbourne. Its head office is in Illinoi USA. The plant in Melbourne has been operating for at least 50 years. Yet the data system and software allows a manager in Illinoi to read a complex set of relations like the gas flow pressures, the glass pool temperatures (including core and perimeter), even the air pressure of the individual injection moulds in real time at any time. Real-time data sets and graphical periodic displays are the norm and have been so for decades.

This particular Melbourne plant produces a million or more items each day and every day from beer bottles to Vegemite jars and lots of other food containers. The plant is a very hostile environment for humans – lots of heat in some sections, lots of noise and vibrations and humidity and production odours. It is not the type of industrial environment that I imagine anyone would want to place a Buddy.

Even in the cleanest sections of the on-floor factory-area summer daytime temperatures can reach 50C and vibration is a constant reality due to the enormous volume of moving glass objects.

Anyone know what the Ingress Protection rating is for a Buddy unit?

If you were inclined you might look up the recent history of Nestle (from memory 2003-2004 or there about) and discover how much money was lost due to the then substandard production control systems. That is why I make the observation that Nestle spends millions on maintaining a competitive production profile.

When a company is dealing with the volumes of scale that Nestle outputs (volumes and metrics that make the glass factory small time), there is an industrial and economic necessity to use the best. To do otherwise leads to inefficiencies and weakness in the production and supply chains (just look at KFC and the huge logistic mess they recently experienced in Britain).

Computerised industrial environments like FMCG cannot exist without an army of purpose built software and hardware devices.

Current design parameters for Buddy, to my industrial mind, do not make it a robust and multi-purpose technological unit for the industrial heart of any FMCG businesses.

Again, I ask a basic yet fundamental question: Anyone know what the Ingress Protection rating is for a Buddy unit?

Broosta