Continental services & technology improves traceability & quality control

Continental provides services to the food and beverage industry which promise to limit industrial hose failures and the associated downtimes, including during installation. Food & Beverage Industry News discovered.

Continental, the first choice for material-driven solutions, continues to redefine its sector with a host of services and technology which not only speed up, but improve productivity, and limit the risk of faults.

With a national network of distributors and in-house capabilities, Continental can service the needs of the food and beverage industry when it comes to hose requirements for the transfer of foods and beverages. Efficiency and safety have never been smarter.

The new Continental CrimpIQ is a 21st-century improvement over manual hose crimping. Precise digital crimping and cloud solutions: a quantum leap in the world of hydraulic and industrial hose assembly. This combined with CrimpCloud greatly increases the efficiency of your operation.

Real-time traceability and improvements in the quality and safety of every crimp is captured. Whether the hose assembly is completed by Continental or the network of Continental authorised distributors, you can be sure that a quality hose assembly will be built every time.

Scott Weston, national business manager says “The idea around CrimpCloud is traceability and quality control. If you have an issue, we can track it down to what might have occurred. That could be the product being assembled incorrectly, whether the person wasn’t trained, or a warranty claim.”

Traceability is a key function of the application. The unique hose identification allows you to track both assembly and operations-related information. Record, manage, and retrieve information that is important to you.

With a proper identification system, downtime can be avoided. Assets can be identified quickly, and replacement products can be sourced in a much shorter time at a lower cost.

To ensure your operations is well equipped, the Continental team and its network of distributions can support with custom-made hose assemblies to meet your needs. Continental is also able to offer industry-leading equipment for you to carry out your own hose assembly.

Weston pointed out that the main reason for hose failures tends to rest on incorrect crimping, which is a big driver behind the creation of CrimpIQ CrimpCloud Management & Traceability system.

“There’s training packages and details for crimping solutions, where the customer can do their own assemblies for their own business and have full traceability and quality control at the same time.

“It’s all connected and will tell the hose assembler the correct assembly process and critical checkpoints. And then you can tag and track each component, which is an asset management aspect to the platform.”

Asset management is nothing new in the food and beverage industry, however what used to be done manually, whether by hand or on an excel spreadsheet, is now vastly improved with technology and has been adopted by the hose assembly industry.

The new crimper controller from Continental is a huge leap forward.

No more hunting through manuals to find the right specs. To crimp a fitting onto a hose, simply use the Continental touchscreen interface, save presets, access tech support and back up your data to the cloud with the touch of a button.

As part of the traceability of the service, and informing customers about the relevant information, is the implementation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and QR Codes.

“Either one of those additions helps the customer with their system,” said Weston.

“If you look brewing as the example, there could be 200 hoses in the operation and the customer can identify each one of those and it’ll point out all o the necessary information for a quick reliable replacement.”

“The used can quote the serial number or scan the QR code, and it will give them all the hose assembler all of the information they require to prepare a replacement item.”

This point alone highlights the benefits of being a part of Continental’s CrimpCloud and CrimpIQ services, especially in terms of limiting downtime and overhead costs.

“It’s a time and money consuming process to call out an expert to identify and survey hose assemblies. Now it’s literally scan a QR code, send that to a hose assembler and it turns up exactly to your required specifications. It’s fast, efficient, and cost effective.

“It reduces downtime significantly, and that is the key.”

The CrimpCloud management and traceability system allows the client to access all historical data relating to all hose assemblies in their operation. This allows every hose assembly to have traceability and a track record for performance ensuring the quality of every hose crimp and eliminating errors. The data can be retrieved any point and can be produced for auditing purposes.

“Pressure testing is also offered with the use of smart test benches,” said Weston.

“All of the test data is uploaded to the CrimpCloud and stored. It’s a fully connected system which is revolutionary in the hose assembly industry. From a crimping machine that tells you what you can and can’t do to a test bench that uploads the information automatically with all the relevant information stored in one system.

“And that information can be recovered by the client for internal quality control and audit purposes, it makes the process easy.”