ABB touts robotics/automation for industries - The Nation

Lumboon Simakajornboon, ABB's local business unit manager for robotics and motion, said the Thai automobile industry has pioneered the use of robotic and automation in its production process, but now major players in food and beverage as well as other industries, such as CP Group, Betrago, Singha, Thai Beverage Group, and Red Bull are also investing heavily in robotic and automation systems. Besides the production process, robotics and automation are used in packaging and moving pallets of finished products onto transport trucks in a bid to increase efficiency and speed for the delivery of products to consumers, he said, adding that major retail and supercenter chains such as Lotus also have installed an automated system for inventory management and logistics. For food and beverage companies, traceability of the raw materials and other ingredients used in the production process has become a new requirement to ensure product safety and the ability to trace back when there are quality and other problems. To facilitate traceablity and other new requirements, machines used factories have become connected to send and recieve data while analytics is used for real-time processing via cloud-based computing facilities. Lumboon said the Thai food and beverage industry is a key target for robotics and automation due to its large footprint with as many as 10,000 producers, including many small and medium-sized enterprises.