Industry 4.0: Tetra Pak benefits from digital technology boost

20 Apr 2018 --- The food and beverage industry is embarking on its biggest transformation in decades, leveraging new technology to improve food quality, increase plant efficiency and boost productivity. Tetra Pak has undergone its own digital transformation over the past few years and is now working with other companies to help them navigate the complex systems and technology.

The multinational food packaging and processing company has launched a whitepaper looking at:
•    The impact of digital tech and Industry 4.0 on food and beverage manufacturers
•    The challenges and opportunities that Industry 4.0 brings
•    Steps that manufacturers can take to overcome challenges, increase productivity and reduce costs.

Industry 4.0 is about smart manufacturing: fully-integrated collaborative systems that respond in real time to meet changing demands and conditions in the factory. It is the next, decisive, leap in industrial history, where automation combines with IT networks and systems, enriched through live and constantly-available data and analytics to drive operations more efficiently and effectively.

FoodIngredientsFirst speaks to Johan Nilsson, VP Tetra Pak Services, about their reasons for launching the whitepaper, and what they are doing as a company to embrace the possibilities of industry 4.0.

“The whitepaper is intended to help demystify Industry 4.0. It was written to offer food manufacturers insights into how they can embrace digital technology and gain an understanding of the full opportunities available, and the sorts of investments they might need to make if they are to seize them,” says Nilsson. “It also looks at what ‘best practice’ looks like, and how businesses can decipher some of the more technical aspects of the concepts involved.”

“We are working with our customers and technology partners to embrace digital transformation. Some of the things that we’re working on include automated restocking of material, automated quality control, augmented reality remote support and predictive maintenance,” Nilsson adds.

Tetra Pak is seeing benefits in terms of cost-effectiveness and more diversified job opportunity, both for themselves and for their customers. “We are seeing great benefits to our business as well as in supporting our customers through their journey,” says Nilsson. “They include improved productivity by data-driven insights, and improved quality assurance using greater automation through IT and robotics. Embracing Industry 4.0 has led to increased productivity, reduced costs and delivered increased profitability for businesses. Internally it also has provided the opportunity for continued progression and upskilling, creating new jobs for employees.”

“Digital transformation is the central part of Tetra Pak’s strategy. We are transforming our business through the use of latest digital technologies focusing on improving the ability to predict machine errors, accelerating response times, and giving the customer faster, direct access to Tetra Pak’s global expertise”.

Elsewhere within the industry, packaging machinery innovators, Gerhard Schubert, are set to launch GripsWorld, a digital platform which allows the company to monitor the system performance for its customers. By collecting data, Schubert is able to optimize overall system effectiveness and predict system errors in advance.

FoodIngredientsFirst speaks to Hartmut Siegel, Director of Sales at Gerhard Schubert, about the capabilities of the GripsWorld monitoring platform:

“GripsWorld is our industry 4.0 platform. It collects data from our packaging machines around the world via the GS Gate, which is attached to all our machines. The benefit is in avoiding unplanned stoppages and consequently increasing the performance and cost-effectiveness of our packaging machines.”

Tetra Pak highlights within its whitepaper that while other industries have embraced digital technology, food and beverage companies have been falling behind thus far. The good news is that the integration of the processes offered by the technologies behind Industry 4.0 can help food manufacturers meet many of the current demands being placed on them, be they about enhancing food safety, better managing their supply chains, ensuring the greatest profitability in a complex, competitive world, or being able to respond flexibly to changing consumer demands.

Tetra Pak is a division of the Tetra Laval Group. Tetra Pak had net sales of US$11.4 billion in 2016 and operates in more than 175 countries. Just recently, Tetra Pak Artistry launched a new suite of packaging material effects, while Tetra Recart innovated in new eco-friendly cartons with e-commerce potential.

By Joshua Poole