Source: Aviculturaindustrial.com.br
The COVID-19 pandemic has completely transformed the routine of processing plants in Brazil. All internal processes, mainly involving the management of employees, have had to be rethought from one moment to another. In production terms, the impact remained limited. However, operating costs showed an enormous increase. The daily routine of industrial plants had to be redesigned. The arrival of employees from their homes, the change of uniforms, the meals, the access to the facilities, everything had to be distanced and protected to avoid the risk of spread of the COVID-19 in the work environment. Processing plants had to absorb the costs resulting from all these preventive measures. That’s why companies started to seek ways to expand the automation of processes by gaining efficiency and trying to reduce costs generated by the pandemic.
Human factor
Even before COVID-19, an increasing number of processing plants around the world were already facing difficulties in hiring employees for their processing lines. "The human factor is the weakest link in the process. Once the pandemic is over, we expect that the trend towards automation continues,” says Ruud Berkers, Sales Director of Marel for Latin America. He points out that while labor is more expensive, the world's appetite for poultry products just grows. This requires greater processing power and higher speed lines. “In a scenario like this, certain manual operations become difficult to be done efficiently and within certain required standards, which makes automation attractive from an economic point of view and for quality too,” says Ruud Berkers.
No more "shoulder-to-shoulder"
Processing plants often feature fairly cold halls with many employees working close to each other, shoulder to shoulder. To allow social distancing, according to Ruud Berkers, the manual processes would need to occupy twice the space or the processing plants would operate with only half of its capacity in the existing space. “Both situations negatively influence the production efficiency. So, whenever possible, automation will be an obvious answer to the challenges, in addition to the greater hygiene of the automated process, since human hands no longer touch products.”