Booming the Brewing Industry: One Flat Panel PC at a Time
We can’t think of a grassroots industry in California that’s had as big a boom as the craft beer industry has in recent years. In 2016, San Diego County alone was home to one hundred and twenty five licensed craft breweries – the most of any region in the United States. In that same year, craft breweries all over the state contributed $7.3 billion to the state’s economy, so it’s clearly a high profile industry. With so much competition, breweries often move to expand their brand and distribution through on-premise bottling and canning. The size and scope of these operations can vary a great deal, and the technology used to manage them is pivotal to a successful business.
It’s posited that the most important step that goes into the mass production of bottled beverages is the one in which bottles are sealed with caps. Capping mistakes can cause quality control issues, with some serious cases forcing the brewery to abandon whole crates of bottles. This can be devastating to the bottom line of a small craft brewery. Not only will a loose or missing cap make bottles unfit for shipment, it allows contaminants into the beers that can make them unsafe for consumption, and that poses a lot of potential liability risks for the company. Poor labeling and miscounts can also plague production lines. That’s why it’s important for companies to invest in quality monitoring system for their bottling operations, and this can be efficiently achieved through the use of industry grade flat panel touchscreen PCs.
An excellent offering in the industrial flat panel, all-in-one computer space is Tangent’s Vita 474 19” flat panel PC. Coupled with capacitive sensors and production line management software, the Vita 474 is a powerful, durable, and reliable computer that can keep up with the demands of any bottle production schedule. It’s fanless design lends itself to reliability and helps maintain a clean working environment. The IP64 rated front panel of the PC offers protection against dust and water (or beer) splashes and can be wiped down without damaging the unit. The flat panel PC has both wired and wireless internet network interfaces, which allows for additional monitoring from stations within or outside the brewery. The PCAP capacitive touchscreen feature makes switching between applications or focusing on particular stations a breeze. Storage space on the flat panel PC can go up to 2TB with a hybrid SSD/HDD drive and can be equipped with up to a beefy 32GB of memory. Other handy features include a good variety of communication ports for peripherals, VESA 75/100 options for flexibility in mounting the flat panel PC, and a very wide operating temperature range of -4ºF to 122ºF. Depending on the software used, the flat panel PC can be configured for communication with most PLCs and motion controllers.
Production management and monitoring is a key component to any successful distribution operation, and equally important is the equipment used to ensure those tasks are handled with accuracy day in and out. Flat panel all-in-one PCs offered by Tangent have been tried and tested to stand to the rigors of industrial use, and can be customized and scaled to suit the needs of businesses both small and large. Because brewery business needs can vary as much as their beers do, Tangent creates products to best suit those needs.