Why PMG | PMG Engineering | Build World-Class Food Factories

What is Engineering and its Significance

Build food factories the Right way

Why Engineering

Why Engineering and not Consultancy

Why Integrated Engineering

Why an Engineering Team

Engineering includes everything that is required to get the job done. When most people think of Engineering, they think of Engineering Drawings. However, it is not that simple. Engineering Drawing is the language of Engineering, in which Engineers communicate and understand each other.

Engineering begins with a Customer having a need. It then requires significant knowledge, skill, and experience on the part of the Engineers to understand the customer requirements, conceptualize a viable solution, plan everything, and realize the plan through optimal design, procurement, and construction. Engineering effectively converts the need into a physical entity that delivers the need. Generally, the customer's understanding of the need is only like the Tip of an Iceberg. For example, you may want to set up a Potato Chips factory, but would not know much about the frying temperature, pumps, valves, instruments, control, automatic cleaning, and 100s of other things which are critical for the production of quality Potato Chips. Evidently, it is the responsibility of Engineers to deliver what the customer may not even be aware of.

Unlike other industries, in the food industry, the goal is twofold (a) to produce the product, and (b) to produce it safely i.e. without contamination. Now, contamination can come from many sources, both inside the factory e.g. building, machinery, people, etc. and outside the factory e.g. raw materials, pollution, water, etc. Contamination is carried into the food product while being processed, by Carriers like air, people, insects, etc.

What is absolutely clear, is that Sources and Carriers of contamination cannot be eliminated. For example, we cannot eliminate all the machinery and the people, nor we can eliminate all the air in the factory building. Therefore, we must minimize the sources and restrict the carriers to produce safe food. And how do we do that? by Good Engineering.

The question is, do you want to spend your time and money to build a poorly performing food factory, or do you want to create a new benchmark that gives your business the competitive edge?

Do you want a food factory

- which requires daily firefighting just to operate,

- which is an embarrassment in front of auditors and your customers,

- which produces inconsistent products leading to customer complaints and business loss,

Or you want a factory that runs systematically, meets global standards, and allows you to focus on growing your business.

Above all, do you want your factory to produce unsafe food products for your consumers? Or you want to proudly produce products that you can serve to your own family.

Isn't this an easy decision to make? But if your factory is not designed and constructed the right way, you will end up precisely in this bad situation. And remember, a food factory is not a website that can be redesigned or upgraded overnight. It is almost impossible to make it right once done wrong.

So what is the right way?

One, Integrated Engineering, meaning all design and execution be it Process, Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Automation, Quality, Safety, etc. be done in one place by the same team of engineers.

Two, Construction Supervision, meaning project construction and installation works to be supervised by experienced engineers on a daily basis.

Three, Hygienic Engineering, meaning the design and construction of every part of the infrastructure is done complying with food safety and good engineering principles.

We at PMG, take complete ownership, of building your food factory, the right way, from basic design to detail engineering, procurement, and construction, until commissioning and handover to the operations team.

As a manufacturer, your expertise is to produce and sell food products. As an engineering company, our expertise is to design and build food factories. Let us work together to build your world-class food factory.

Engineering is not something optional but essential to the design and construction of a food factory or for that matter everything. It is not a cost, but an investment that will save money in all the other investments in equipment and services.

To construct a new food factory, or to expand or upgrade an existing factory, is the need of your business. Engineering converts that need into a complete description of the entity and contains all the information required to build the entity. Without engineering, you will build something you don't fully understand.

The real question isn't, do I need Engineering?

Rather, am I ready to risk all of my investment just to save the cost of Engineering?

Engineering is the difference between Chaos and Excellence. If you are going to do it, you should do it right.

You have to design and build your Food Factory for the future, which means not only it qualifies as a best-in-class factory today but also a decade or two in the future. You want to build a food factory complying with global standards on food safety and hygienic engineering. And possibly, you have tried to do this by engaging consultants in the past. But I guess, you were mostly left unsatisfied and even worried about your investment even with multiple consultants onboard.

Why? Because Consultancy is not Engineering.

Engineering is the end-to-end capability for getting the job done.

Consultancy is about sharing ideas, possibly great ideas. An excellent consultant can give you 100s of great ideas and examples of what can be done, but he or she won't be able to do it for you. Just ideas are no good, right? Implementation is key.

Engineering, on the other hand, is about realizing on the ground what is necessary, useful, and optimal for your business and also avoiding what is fancy, useless and unviable for your business. Engineering is much more than Consultancy, it includes all the design and implementation aspects, to convert ideas into reality.

Your factory is a system of many sub-systems. For example, a factory consists of buildings machinery, people, storage areas, etc. Each of these sub-systems is a sum of their own sub-systems.

Now, every system or sub-system will have its own deliverables, e.g., each machine must process food quickly, storage areas must store food in specific quantities, etc. However, the most critical and overall deliverables of your factory are not dependent on any one system or sub-system e.g. production capacity, process efficiency, product quality, food safety, and others. These are what are called Emergent variables of a system.

To predict and deliver these Emergent variables requires significant knowledge, skill, and experience in an integrated manner across the value chain, across each and every aspect of the factory infrastructure.

Hence, even if you have 100 experts, each working on one aspect of your factory infrastructure, such a plan is bound to fail on the key deliverables of your project. Battery limits are the enemies of Ownership, leading to a lack of accountability, and, consequently, poor design and execution of the project.

Hence, good engineering cannot be done in silos, or independently by different experts. Integrated Engineering is absolutely vital for the good design and execution of your project.

A food industry project is a massive undertaking irrespective of its scale or cost. It requires Engineering expertise from many domains, e.g. Process, Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Automation, Quality, Safety, and others.

No matter how good, one person cannot be a know-it-all or do-it-all. It is simply not possible, considering typical project timelines.

To overcome this, an experienced consultant or engineer may outsource the various works to other agencies or experts. Essentially, we have ended up working in silos, and the quality of work is severely impacted, as none of the outsourced partners really care about stuff outside their scope. A sub-vendor will never care about the original customer. And the consultant can never go into details because he is actually doing the work.

Hence, if you want to do good work, you must engage a team that has all the competencies in-house with related experience to firstly qualify to take end-to-end responsibility and secondly deliver the project goals.

Time is money. A good engineering team will save you massive amounts of time by knowing what they are doing, doing it the first time right, and taking responsibility.

PMG Engineering | Build World-Class Food Factories | Why PMG