New Plant Floor Certification for Foods, Beverages, Pharmaceuticals

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.MODULAR introduced its new PlantFloorCertified (PFC) program that allows IT and plant management to select standard computing solutions for their plant floor needs, regardless of any harsh environments encountered on food, beverage, meat or pharmaceutical plant floors.

The program enables IT and Plant managers to choose from any commercially available off-the-shelf brand or model of computer, printer, monitor or display, without regarding concern for how operation of the products might be adversely affected by the NEMA 4X/IP65 and other often-harsh environments typical of plant floors. The program also offers solution in deploying a corporate-mandated office computing system onto the plant floor. Specialized "Industrial Computers" have been available for the food, beverage, meat and pharmaceutical plant floors for many years. However, for most plants the suitability of such specialized systems has been limited due to factors like long development lead times, high costs, difficulties of inserting proprietary boards and CPUs into an a standard corporate network, increased costs and longer downtimes and the food plants' IT HELP desks inability to solve problems with the proprietary systems. The PFC program eliminates each of these challenges.

The program allows IT and plant managers to select standard office computers and peripherals from their vendors of choice, MODULAR develops a standard or custom application-specific, cost effective NEMA 4X/IP65 PlantFloorCertified solution, as well as assembles the computing solution then tests it and provides a 100% guarantee that selected computers and peripherals will function properly. Additionally, the company's proof of concept program reduces customer product development by 50%. The computers and peripherals can be provided by either the customer or MODULAR and system assembly can take place at the company's factory in Tennessee or on-site at customers' facilitates. PFC solutions are able to be developed for a single computer or for thousands of complete plant floor computing systems and prices for the systems are often 10% to 60% less than that of "Industrial Computers."