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When it comes to milk, there’s nothing theoretical about the term “shelf life.” Food and beverage packaging companies must assemble and fill each milk carton rapidly enough for it to arrive at grocery stores — some located 3,000 miles away — weeks before the expiration date.
Setting the pace in this race against spoilage is SIG. The Swiss-based company sells packaging and equipment to customers in over 65 countries. In 2017 alone, SIG equipment produced 33.6 billion carton packs. Its machines assemble and fill carton packages for drinks and food at rapid-fire rates — in the space of an hour, they can fill 9,000 large cartons, 12,000 medium cartons, or 24,000 smaller cartons with milk, veggies, soups and other foodstuffs.
No wonder unplanned downtime can be disastrous. To avoid setbacks, SIG offers its customers extensive maintenance services, such as routine checkups, speedy responses when things go wrong and delivery of spare parts. But even those measures cannot account for human error. What if routine inspections fail to capture a glitch in the machine used to pour milk into cartons? Or the technician called in to handle repairs gets stuck in traffic? Unfortunately, spoiled milk waits for no one.
But help is on the way. Starting in July, SIG will deploy two GE Digital industrial applications — Predix Asset Performance Management (APM) and Predix ServiceMax— to improve efficiency of equipment at its 400 customer factories around the world. The agreement marks the first time the two applications based on Predix, GE Digital’s Industrial Internet platform, will be deployed in tandem to tend to the overall well-being of manufacturing equipment and the servicing of that equipment.
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“Think of that old sticker in your car telling you to go to Jiffy Lube for an oil change every six months,” explains Scott Berg, CEO of ServiceMax from GE Digital. “We followed the rules because we didn’t know any better and it sounded scary, but it was a waste of time.” Top and above GIF images credits: SIG.
To put this into context, think of your home heating system — something you rarely consider until it conks out in the middle of January. When you’re sitting in a freezing house, every hour feels like an eternity. The APM software would keep an eye on the boiler to make sure you know when repairs are needed before it breaks. APM would pass that information on to ServiceMax, GE Digital’s field service management software, which would ensure a repair person makes the necessary fixes to keep the heat on — before it goes out.
APM will collect data off sensors on SIG assembly-line equipment to predict problems before they lead to an outage. It also improves equipment productivity by switching from preventive maintenance checks to predictive maintenance. “Think of that old sticker in your car telling you to go to Jiffy Lube for an oil change every six months,” explains Scott Berg, CEO of ServiceMax from GE Digital. “We followed the rules because we didn’t know any better and it sounded scary, but it was a waste of time.” APM acts like a far more complex version of the “wrench sign” on your dashboard — gathering information to determine when it’s time for a tuneup.
All equipment ultimately requires some maintenance. That’s when ServiceMax, kicks into gear, dispatching a service engineer to make the necessary fixes before a machine needs to be taken completely offline for repairs. Additionally, within moments of a service call, SIG field service workers can find out everything needed to fix the problem.
First, the dispatcher can scan each technician’s work history to identify the nearest person with the right skills for the job. Next, he or she lays out a step-by-step guide for execution, even lining up the right spare parts for the technician to bring to the site. When the technician signs into his or her tablet or laptop for work that morning, everything needed to perform the job appears as a daily diary that’s accessible offline — a major benefit given the remote locations of some factories, including those in developing nations.
At day’s end, the technician synchronizes his or her day’s experience back to the software, teaching the machine-learning algorithm even more about maintenance — be it how long the procedure took or any additional tweaks the worker had to make.
Such feedback closes the loop on a virtuous cycle for SIG. Based on past Service Max customer experience, the company could achieve a 13 percent average increase in machine uptime and a 12 percent reduction in repair time. All of this culminates in a 19 percent improvement in productivity — enough to deliver customers to a land of milk and honey.