Schneider Electric’s Lexington Smart Factory is one of the world’s most forward-thinking plants. Recognized by the World Economic Forum as an Advanced Lighthouse for Sustainable Manufacturing, this 62-year-old brownfield site has become a model for Schneider Electric’s factories around the world, with a digital innovation strategy built on IIoT connectivity, edge and predictive analytics.

Every day, the Lexington plant produces more than 16,000 finished products. It’s a large and complex operation — and as it continued to expand, the team found that traditional paper-based reporting was holding them back. They came to us looking for a way to digitize and harness data, so they could unlock silos, drive process efficiency, and advance their sustainability ambitions worldwide.

We helped the team enhance overall plant efficiency and safety by pairing Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Solution with a hybrid SaaS environment including AVEVA™ Edge, AVEVA™ Discrete Lean Management, and AVEVA™ Insight on our industrial cloud platform, AVEVA™ Connect.

The first step was to capture data. With the power of AVEVA™ Edge, critical WIP information is pulled from Schneider Electric’s PLCs and streamed to the AVEVA™ Insight operations and asset management platform in the cloud.

From there, AVEVA™ Discrete Lean Management makes critical information available when and where it’s needed. Production floor staff are connected with machine performance data through mobile notifications, driving major improvements in data visualization, safety and decision-making. With AVEVA™ Insight, the team was also able to bring data previously stored in spreadsheets into a cloud-based dashboard, enabling plant-wide visualization via real-time process data that is easily accessible and shareable.

As well as delivering big improvements in efficiency and operational excellence, the new system has enabled the team to drive impressive gains in critical ESG criteria, cutting energy usage by 26%, water consumption by 20%, and CO² by 78%, in conjunction with renewable energy credits.

Today Lexington is a showcase for Schneider Electric’s digital transformation and sustainability vision, with its lean management solution deployed in over 90 Smart Factories worldwide. By combining IIoT connectivity with both edge and predictive analytics, the team is able to drive new levels of process efficiency while helping to advance their sustainability ambitions.

Like chocolate? You probably have Barry Callebaut to thank for it. The Swiss-Belgian company is the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa, producing more than 2.2m tonnes of confectionery every year in their 64 factories — amounting to 25% of the world’s chocolate products.

As part of their digital transformation journey, the team set out to create their own smart factory model that could bring together people, process and technology. As well as going fully paperless, they wanted to improve traceability, quality, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and dosing accuracy, while reducing waste and energy use. We helped them find the solution.

The first step was to implement a standardized plant data backbone, using AVEVA™ System Platform. The solution provided them with a single source of truth, capable of standardizing and validating data from multiple sources, while reducing complexity.

With access to fast and accurate data secured, the team began a ‘test and learn’ implementation approach, using a modular strategy that focused on their most important value drivers: performance, energy, yield and quality.

Each model was trialed on carefully chosen pilot sites, allowing the team to quickly learn and improve while focusing on delivering value and a high-quality user experience. Successes and learnings were quickly shared on an online portal, allowing new use cases and best practices to be adopted at any one of their global sites.

Sweet success

Almost immediately, the benefits started to flow. For example, with accurate, real-time data, the team were able to conduct higher quality analyses of their run rates. The insights they found helped reduce variability and uncover hidden capacity, improving overall productivity by ≥10% — equal to a whole new production line.

With the model proven, the team is now working to roll it out across the enterprise. By 2025, they’re aiming to have achieved fully autonomous production, able to consistently produce batches with zero quality defects at maximum capacity. We’ll be working with them to make it happen.

Kellogg is one of the world’s largest food and beverage manufacturers, producing much-loved products for millions of customers in 180 markets around the world. From its founding in 1906 by John Harvey Kellogg, the company has always been defined by innovation. Today, they’re continuing to develop and move forward, with a culture of data-driven decision-making made possible by the AVEVA™ PI System.

Kellogg came to us looking for a robust industrial information management system they could use to manage data across their smart factories. We helped the team deploy AVEVA™ PI System, which effectively captures data from tens of thousands of sensors, standardizes it, and makes it available when and where it’s needed — including sharing with trusted partners.

This connected approach is already yielding major benefits. For example, at the Valls plant in Spain, the factory regularly receives shipments of chocolate — a perishable ingredient which needs to be kept at a specific temperature. Previously, shipments were sometimes kept waiting due to lack of capacity. But by using sensors to monitor storage levels and sharing the insights with their suppliers, the team can ensure that shipments only arrive when they have capacity — increasing efficiency and reducing waste.

At Kellogg headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan the same system has delivered impressive energy savings. AVEVA™ PI System helped Kellogg to leverage, analyze and manage energy data in its factories, creating a digital ecosystem that benchmarked usage and identified opportunities for savings. As a result, Kellogg saved $3.3 million in a single year and identified an additional $1.8 million in rebates, and optimized abatement measures.

As a global laundry and home care leader, Henkel is committed to sustainable operations and came to AVEVA to help realize their sustainability vision.

Henkel 2020+ is a series of initiatives aimed at delivering sustainable and profitable business growth through digital transformation. Their objective: to become three times more efficient by 2030.

To reach their goal, Henkel needed a better way to capture, understand and communicate energy consumption and emissions data from across Laundry and Home Care’s global supply chain. At the same time, they wanted to cut energy consumption across production sites, using ISO 50001 standards as guidance.

Early in the project, Henkel identified the need for a new environmental management system, able to integrate with legacy hardware and assimilate with future hardware communications standards.

We helped them create a new energy monitoring system based on AVEVA software. 
As of 2020, the system incorporates more than 4,000 physical and virtual sensors, capturing over one million data points a day across electricity, fossil fuels, compressed air, steam, water and sewage.

Today, the system is used by more than 2,000 employees to easily observe and analyze performance and identify possible improvements.

As well as delivering meaningful progress towards sustainability goals, the solution has saved Henkel €37m to date. That equates to full payback four times over — with 100% ROI delivered after less than four years.