Make an Informed Decision | PMG Engineering | Build World-Class Food Factories

Good vs Bad Food Factory

Impact of Engineering on Project Cost

Impact of Engineering on Food Safety

Traditional Consultants vs PMG Engineering

Impact of Engineering on Operations Cost

Our Experience and Customers

A good factory delivers sustainable production of safe, reliable, and consistent products, while a bad factory will give random variations in the quality of products failing required norms and expectations.

Key Differences Between a Good Factory & a Bad Factory

1. Systematic vs. Unsystematic Operations

A good factory is run via fool-proof and fail-safe systems, monitored by operators with historical logging.
A bad factory operates unsystematically, relying on operators without proper data tracking.

2. Compliance & Brand Quality

A good factory meets food safety compliances and exceeds the quality of competition brands.
A bad factory fails food safety checks and becomes a second-choice brand in the market.

3. Management Focus: Growth vs. Firefighting

In a good factory, management focuses on productivity, innovation, and business growth.
In a bad factory, management is always in firefighting mode, just struggling to keep production running.

4. Industry Recognition & Scalability

A good factory is recognized as an industry leader for 15-25 years, designed for easy expansion and upgradation.
A bad factory is poorly designed, making expansion and upgrades costly and unviable.

5. Work Culture & Teamwork

A good factory fosters teamwork, engagement, and an inspirational work culture.
A bad factory suffers from resistance to improvement and lack of teamwork.

Good engineering is like a good education. Like how good education leads to a higher quality of one's life, the quality of engineering in design and construction determines the quality of a factory throughout its operating life.

One easy-to-observe symptom of bad engineering is the haste in releasing key orders early on in the project. Typically, the decision to do a project may take months or even years; however, as soon as a project is approved, this sense of getting delayed every day, becomes a convenient excuse for total neglect of the engineering required.

Much later, it is observed that the project budget and timeline won't be met, and typically get doubled vs the original plan. Bad engineering ends up with:

Double the cost
Double the timeline
Half the possible quality

Is the hurry early on, and the neglect of engineering, really worth it?

On the other hand, with good engineering, we may see purchase orders being released in a calm and staggered manner. However, such an approach does achieve the project objectives of quality, cost, and timeline. It allows for a good foundation on which several pillars of good factory operations can stand upon, e.g., lean design, traceability, and process capability.

With bad engineering, even though you may order the key equipment to the best and most costly suppliers, as the saying goes, the weakest link in the chain defines the strength of the chain, and likewise you will end up with a factory whose quality is defined by the scope neglected.

However, with good engineering, your investment is balanced across the value chain, spent in the most optimal manner, and will give you the best possible outcome possible from your investment.

Food Safety essentially refers to minimizing the risk of contamination in the food product during processing. We cannot eliminate all risks, it is just not possible. Why?

Everything in the factory which is not the actual food product, e.g. equipment, building, etc. is a source of contamination.
Everything in the factory which can move, e.g. people, air, etc. is a carrier of contamination.
Hence, the Sources of contamination, and the Carriers of contamination are inevitable, and they simply can't be eliminated.

What is possible is to minimize the risk and manage the residual risk?

Bad engineering leads to uncontrollable, unmanageable amounts of risk, while good engineering avoids the majority of the risk and manages the residual risk.

For example, a poor building design can lead to paint coming off and falling onto the product, pests/ insects entering from outside, water stagnating on the floor, etc. Whereas a good building design will provide smooth, robust surfaces, leak-proof building envelope, proper slope for drainage, etc.

Another example, poorly designed equipment may render cleaning impossible leaving behind food traces after CIP or COP, and hence contaminating the next production batch. Whereas properly designed equipment will allow 100% cleaning validation in CIP and 100% access for verification.

The same with every infrastructural element of the food factory.

The ethical and responsible way for any manufacturer is to produce what can be served to one's own family. Only good engineering can make this possible.

It is a fact that over the past few decades, the trust of customers on consultants has eroded. While the improper quality of work by some consultants has been a contributing factor, the major reason has been customers underestimating the engineering work scope, and hence choosing consultants lacking capability. Unaware of the potential value creation and savings by good engineering, customers have chosen for lower cost of bad engineering, leading to poor quality of factory infrastructure with high operations costs and food safety issues.

We at PMG Engineering offer a completely different value proposition compared to other consultants.

While traditional consultants lack a team of engineers, at PMG, we have a team comprising engineers from all engineering domains needed to build a food factory.
A traditional consultant having done work in a narrow field has only domain-specific knowledge. At PMG, we have the knowledge and experience across the food processing domains, e.g. dairy, beverages, snacks, ingredients, etc., and hence can bring in novel ideas to create new benchmarks in every project.
Traditional consultants generally become consultants after a long operations experience and thus lack project engineering knowledge and experience. The team at PMG has unparalleled knowledge and experience in doing projects, while supported by team members with operations experience.
Traditional consultants approach new projects as a repeat of their past projects. At PMG, we have a passionate desire to build something better, that can become a new benchmark in the industry.
Traditional consultants will charge low consultancy fee, to just begin with the work, but later when client is forced on matters, they will ask for higher fee. Also, they will insist on sourcing via their specific vendors with conflict of interest. At PMG, we stick to our transparent work proposal terms, while educating and enabling the customer to source from among 3 to 4 vendors for each requirement.
Traditional consultants give verbal instructions and a few drawings only for formality, and in this way, they never let the project or the stakeholders be at ease. At PMG, everything we do is on Paper, we completely avoid verbal instructions, and our engineering documentation ensures, the project can move forward even in our absence.
Traditional consultants, in many other ways, create high dependency by keeping open ends. While we at PMG empower clients and contractors with self-explanatory design documents.
A characteristic feature of traditional consultants is that they outsource design works to other companies, which is a major quality compromise, for your project. At PMG, we do everything in-house with our full-time resources.
Another major drawback is that traditional consultants would simply not take responsibility for project execution quality or timeline, or cost. They are comfortable giving a few design drawings and documents, at the customer’s loss. At PMG, we ensure that whenever we work, we take responsibility not only for engineering design but also for engineering supervision to meet project objectives of quality, timeline, and cost.
Finally, traditional consultants simply lack the vision of meeting global standards. Whereas at PMG, we craft and deliver a realistic vision to match MNC quality at an affordable cost for our customers to stand out from the competition.

Let's say we have built one factory with bad engineering and another one with good engineering. How do they really differ in terms of Operations or Running Costs?

The good engineering factory, will run smoothly and require the minimal focus and time of the operations and management team. Hence, not only will the factory have low maintenance costs, but the people shall have time to spend on improvements and optimizations, leading to a reduction in operations cost year-on-year.

The bad engineering factory will have a high cost of operations due to quality rejections, production breakdowns, and related costs of repairs and spares. The factory team shall be mostly occupied with production and maintenance, leaving no time or motivation for any process improvement or optimization.

We at PMG are proud of our humble beginnings, our comprehensive project experiences, and our trustworthiness with each and every customer we have worked with. We work to build food factories that, once commissioned, would operate effortlessly.

Nobody should call us back asking for help with any sort of operations issue. With this context, we make every engineering decision during the project stage.

At PMG, we have done more than 125 Engineering Design works cumulatively managing more than INR 1500 Cr of Capital Investment end-to-end, and more than 100+ Engineering Supervision works managing execution of an additional 1500 Cr of Capital Investment.

We have done 50+ greenfield projects, 75+ factory expansion projects, and 60+ factory upgradation projects. In summary, we have done 200+ food industry projects in over 100+ locations in 10+ countries.

The projects designed and supervised by PMG cumulatively produce 25,000 tons per day of food products, which as per standard estimates, impact roughly 100 million consumers.

We feel extremely proud to be responsible and have contributed to the safety and well-being of the end consumers while contributing to the business of our customers.

This, in fact, is the central motivation for our existence as a company, and we look forward to contributing to your next food factory project.

PMG Engineering | Build World-Class Food Factories | Make an Informed Decision