Maximum efficiency might be the mantra of the modern manufacturing sector, but it’s no longer enough just for volumes to go up and costs down.
People want the latest product, produced to the highest quality, at a reasonable price — and they want it now. So time to market is a major factor for manufacturers today, says Raj Batra, president of Siemens USA’s Digital Factory Division.
"Product complexity has more than doubled in the last 15 years. Product lifecycles have shortened by about 25% — and no one is immune," he says. "All manufacturers need to get new products out faster. The key is to scale them and get them to market quickly."
At the same time, manufacturers must enhance flexibility, improve quality, boost efficiency, and guarantee security, while optimizing sustainability.
The key to such all-round enterprise agility — whether you're growing vegetables, brewing beer, or making candy — is digital technology.
Click below to see how digital technology is impacting the following industries.
Agriculture
Confectionery
Beverage
Agriculture goes digital
“From pod to fork, you will have full traceability, thanks to digital technology. This tech is good enough to eat.”
- Sinan Bank, AgPod Project Lead
Ultimately, AgPods grow food you can trust.
“We use no pesticides, fertilizer, or chemical enhancers — and have the analytics to prove it,” says Bank. “From pod to fork, you will have full traceability, thanks to digital technology. This tech is good enough to eat.”
The booming world population is forecast to rise to nearly 10 billion by 2050, with urbanization and climate change intensifying demands on global food production.
How technology can help us feed that number of hungry mouths is the question being tackled by AgPod project lead Sinan Bank, who's working with Siemens Corporate Technology.
Quite simply, the future of farming is digital, he says.
“Starting from the seed and ending in packaging, we want to use our expertise in digital technology and robotics to create a fully autonomous, sustainable solution — one that is not only leaner and more resource-efficient,” Bank says, “but also satisfies demand for the same high quality of fresh healthy food, at relatively lower cost.”
The answer being trialed in a modern living lab in Princeton, New Jersey, is Autonomous Agricultural Pods, or AgPods. They allow farmers to control and monitor the growth of any crop, from anywhere at any time.
Using a modular system of plant towers, serviced by mobile robots, AgPods are flexible and scalable. They can operate indoors or outdoors, with or without soil — independent of the growing medium or the type of growing system.
AgPods also grow with intelligence. One of the keys is using the Siemens MindSphere open IoT operating system, which employs machine learning and sensors to measure moisture, pH, and temperature for predictive analytics. This helps bring the yield rate into profit, driving up the sustainable business case.
Queen City Candy is a full-service company based in Greendale, Indiana. In 2015 it made a bold decision to change its business model from distribution to manufacturing its own products, including gummies, jellies, fruit snacks, and nutraceuticals.
“When I started Queen City Candy in 1983, I never dreamed we would be manufacturing candy,” says Vince Klee, president and CEO. “In the beginning, I had a lot of sleepless nights going through this process [of becoming a manufacturer]. But we have seen sales increase by 40%. We are producing 1 million gummy bears an hour.”
Bringing the supply chain in-house and taking the leap into manufacturing represents a big step for any existing business. But when you're looking at a state-of-the-art automation facility, holding 5 million pounds of candy and supplying over 1,000 customers worldwide, the solution really needs to hit the sweet spot.
Familiarity with the technology from Siemens, and its reliability and user-friendly interface, helped to reduce potential risks associated with what was a significant investment in a highly competitive and tightly regulated sector. With the help of Bosch, the system installed by Siemens has been vital in providing performance and productivity analytics, both at the outset and ongoing.
Starting from the ground up — literally — the project began with pouring of the concrete floor. It finished with cooking, coloring, flavoring, and conditioning of the first candies off the production line — fresh and ready to go, marked "Made in the USA."
Queen City Candy produces
1 million gummy bears per hour
Sweetening the manufacturing process
Beverage
Confectionery
Agriculture
"Nava is so critical to our success, not only from a supply-chain standpoint but also innovation," says Bruce Jacobson, chief commercial officer at CBI. "It is critical not only to our past successes but to our long-term future."
When Constellation Brands Inc. (CBI) bought Grupo Modelo in 2013, it acquired not only a portfolio of famous beer brands — including Corona, Pacifico, Victoria, and Modelo — but also a proud heritage of brewing traditions dating to 1925.
The brewer’s flagship facility in Nava, Mexico, produced approximately 8.5 million hectoliters of beer a year. Capacity, however, was constrained, yet with CBI forecast to deliver more than 50% of the entire beer industry's growth over the next five years, expansion was a top priority.
CBI embarked on an investment program designed to turn the Nava facility into one of the biggest breweries of its kind ever built. Already, capacity has more than tripled, to 27.5 million hectoliters, with plans to reach 30 million. And all through the expansion, Nava remained fully operational.
Running a brewery of this size without automation was unthinkable, so CBI installed SIMATIC PCS 7 software from Siemens, with batch and route control, to manage every stage of the brewing process. On the packaging, filling and warehouse side, Siemens SIMATIC S7 PLCs keep lines running with efficiency. The technology is designed to help the company meet its goals of productivity, uptime, efficiency, safety, and reliability.
CBI wanted globally standardized technology. Working with Siemens enabled it to integrate diverse elements into one cohesive solution. What that means in terms of quality control is that every single batch of beer gets brewed to the same standard.
The Nava facility's capacity has more than tripled to 27.5 million hectoliters, with plans to reach 30 million.
Technology meets
the brewery
Beverage
Confectionery
Agriculture
How Siemens brings innovation to manufacturing
Methods of maximum efficiency
Digital technology changes everything
In recent decades, the worlds of automation and software were separate. Today, they can be seamlessly integrated, and Siemens has invested more than $10 billion globally on acquisitions for industry automation and software over the past 10 years.
"These investments give customers a competitive advantage,” Raj Batra says, adding that digital transformation helps companies discover and monetize new business models.
“That might mean delivering new value-added services or creating entirely new revenue streams,” he says. “Regardless, there is no doubt that transforming your manufacturing operations with advanced automation and digital technology will yield rapid benefits for your company. And those benefits will only increase over time.”
Find out how Siemens digital technology can help your company be more efficient.
Photography © Getty Images | Siemens | Queen City Candy | Constellation Brands
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