Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 3 – Intelligent Factories

A smart factory is agile and adaptable and will support different production scenarios.
It is also elastic, able to deal with varying production volumes and to easily support new manufacturing technologies, such as additive manufacturing. The intelligent factory uses manufacturing operations management with predictive and prescriptive capabilities, real-time data, feedback loops with recipe development and ERP, and network capabilities for product development collaboration.

Let us set the spotlight on two customer use cases in the Consumer Products industry:

How SAP IoT solutions help reaching the sustainability goals of Gerolsteiner

IoT ans Sustainability seem not to be a common couple, but for Gerolsteiner Brunnen GmbH & Co. KG is a supplier of the most purchased mineral water brand on the German market, the sustainable use of mineral water sources is a top priority. In order to use its most important resource, the Gerolsteiner mineral water, even more gently, the Mineralbrunnen has initiated this IoT project.   The key challenge was to get a transparent monitoring of real and predicted resource use in production.

The result was an Intelligent Resource Efficiency Solution on SAP Cloud Platform to connect IoT data and production data for a reliable forecast of resource use in production.

It is now possible to forecast the future requirements for Mineral Water in real time, and Gerolsteiner is already able to reduce the impact of spontaneous fluctuations in demand. With functionality this beverage company is now able to provide Production the flexibility it requires to ensure efficient sustainable use of all our resources. It is now possible to forecast the future requirements for Mineral Water in real time and as a result Gerolsteiner reduces significantly the impact of spontaneous fluctuations in demand. With functionality this customer is now able to provide production the flexibility it requires to ensure efficient sustainable use of all resources.

Quality Management in Industry 4.0 – Grupo Cerealto Siro is ahead of the pack:

A more typical Industry 4.0 Consumer Products use case is the intelligent, data-driven quality control. To achieve high-quality, products manufacturers use structured methods like Six Sigma, 8D, and FMEA. Based on this, products are being inspected at various stages in the process chain.

The Spanish confectionary manufacturer Grupo Cerealto Siro initiated a major Industry 4.0 project involving Internet of Things (IoT), Edge computing and Machine Learning.

The former manual check on quality parameters has now been replaced with automatic, more frequent data  collection. Older machines have been equipped with IoT sensors. The data from these machines as well as the  ne from newer machines with built-in sensors  is brought together in one single platform. This initial setup of connecting all machines is achieved through first connecting machines to an SAP Edge server that aggregates and analyzes data real-time and brings it into the cloud.

But the project did not stop there: machine data is set into business context with the previously implemented SAP  RP systems. That way, Grupo Cerealto Siro can link production parameters with machine details to predict quality  risks or link it with orders and customer data. With connecting and setting sensor data into context, the company  as just successfully completed the first step in embracing Industry 4.0 (for more information, please read Corinna Kramer’ s blog).

The next theme in Industry4.0 for a Consumer Products manufacturer is Intelligent Assets (Blog post 4).

Read all blog posts of this series:

• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 1 – Overview 
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 2 – Intelligent Product 
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 3 – Intelligent Factory
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 4 – Intelligent Assets
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 5 – Empowered People
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 6 – What´s in for you?