Niranjan Kulkarni on optimizing pet food manufacturing
Dec 6, 2019
Niranjan Kulkarni, Ph.D. is featured in Pet Food Processing’s “Modern tech, innovative approaches for optimizing process efficiencies.”
In discussing the benefits of using automation to improve overall efficiency, Kulkarni says “Automation solutions to dispense commonly used raw materials, automated palletizing, and integrating automated systems to collect downtime data, etc. are gaining popularity.”
Automated solutions help reduce overall cycle time, better understand the root cause of downtimes, and improve operator ergonomics and safety.
Kulkarni also weighs in on material handling and delivery (MH&D) as an area often overlooked by processors.
“With increase in demands, variety of SKUs produced, different packaging requirements, etc. the amount of material to be moved to the production areas or packaging lines, and back to the warehouse, has increased,” Kulkarni says. “Often, and for good reasons, the focus is on improving production or packaging cycle times. However, without understanding and addressing the impact of these changes on MH&D needs, i.e., frequency of movements, adequacy of pallet jacks or fork trucks, operator requirements, etc., improvements made in the aforementioned areas may not be realized completely.”
