New technologies provide us with an initial impression about possibilities in producing food and beverages of the future. With a rapidly expanding world population, businesses must start producing on a large scale. The digital revolution can have a real impact on production processes.
Changing consumer and market trends represent a challenge for industry as they mean increased amounts of product variants, recipes and brands developed, produced and managed. This makes food and beverage products (typically mass produced) much more complex. It is mandatory to consistently monitor raw materials and product over the entire production process. Managing a huge product variety, smaller batch sizes and maintaining high quality levels requires a major change in the way these items are produced.
Both discrete and process workflows can benefit from Digitalisation. Siemens refers to this portfolio as the Digital Enterprise. It is based on a holistic approach that transforms the traditional value chain of a product into an integrated product and production lifecycle – from product design to production planning, engineering, execution and services. Only a fully digitised business model with a consistent digital thread has the power and flexibility to speed up processes and optimise production operations.
Siemens’ new solution can create digital twins of products, plants and production lines to stimulate and optimise the entire workflow. It also enables the integration of individual machines in the plant (known as the bottom up approach) and the top down approach that allows central engineering of the entire plant. Both approaches ensure the comprehensive Digitalisation of the engineering process.
After design and engineering, digital twins allow for virtual commissioning, so that all previous development steps are efficiently validated. Production process and bottling also benefit from simulation and optimisation with digital twins. Machines and production lines connected to MindSphere (an open, cloud-based IoT operation system) enables an entirely new dimension of transparency. This results in additional opportunities for optimising processes with added value for the client. This equates to shorter time to market, flexible engineering, optimal product quality and greater plant availability and efficiency.
Product design
CHALLENGE: New products are continually introduced. With factories located in different countries using different raw materials, consistent product quality is a must. All national regulations when marketing a brand in a different country must also be fulfilled.
SOLUTION: The Simatic IT R&D Suite allows you to define product composition and simulate product performance to meet product requirements. It supports formula optimisation and includes a regulatory assessment to ensure compliance to national and international law. Teamcenter NX allows the creation of a digital twin of the product package. This enables the right fit between cost efficiency and an appealing design.
Production planning
CHALLENGE: After design the product must be produced on a large scale bearing in mind that R&D and the production department are often disconnected.
SOLUTION: Comos and Tecnomatix meets this challenge with efficient planning and simulation capabilities. The creation of a digital twin helps simulate critical processes, checks material and product flow, validates production capacity and identifies bottlenecks and overcapacities.
Production engineering
CHALLENGE: During this phase, all mechanical and electrical components and automation steps are engineered in detail. Integrated workflows increase engineering efficiency during production, filling and the packaging process.
SOLUTION: Braumat, in combination with Simatic IT MES, allows meshing of all relevant data including packaging and offline topics. When used in combination with Simatic IT Unilab it reacts to your production.
Production execution
CHALLENGE: Production execution links the virtual world of planning with the real world of production. To achieve this, manufacturers must synchronise manufacturing operation with business processes.
SOLUTION: Simatic IT Preactor offers the possibility to plan and schedule orders based on cost, energy consumption, availability of material, equipment, employees and other process related constraints like cleaning-in-place. Siemens technology makes it easier to get transparency of production assets, calculate and report KPI with line balancing algorithms. This minimises downtime.
Service
CHALLENGE: To unlock data assets and put them to profitable use to increase availability, quality and efficiency across the value chain.
SOLUTION: MindSphere is an open ecosystem that enables connection to all industrial devices. It makes data from worldwide, distributed machines and assets valuable. Two new MindSphere applications are dedicated to the F&B industry. With dozens of plants across the world, companies can display and benchmark relevant KPI’s for their production lines. The focus can fall on product quality and efficiency of the filling and packaging lines. MindSphere provides the right information to all stakeholders within a complex and distributed organisation.
