Integrated asset performance and field service management

SIG is set to deliv­er the first inte­grat­ed APM (asset per­for­mance man­age­ment) and FSM (field ser­vice man­age­ment) dig­i­tal solu­tion for the food and bev­er­age indus­try. Devel­oped in part­ner­ship with GE Dig­i­tal, the Plant 360 Asset Man­age­ment will fea­ture a range of on-demand dig­i­tal ser­vices designed to help man­u­fac­tur­ers reach new lev­els of effi­cien­cy, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and con­nec­tiv­i­ty in their operations.

SIG Plant 360 Asset Man­age­ment is being co-devel­oped with GE Dig­i­tal in response to increas­ing demands in the food and bev­er­age indus­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly the need for high­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, qual­i­ty and uptime. With this inno­v­a­tive and inte­grat­ed solu­tion com­prised of GE Digital’s APM and ServiceMax’s FSM soft­ware, SIG will offer state-of-the-art dig­i­tal tools to help its cus­tomers boost pro­duc­tion, reduce down­time and ensure even greater qual­i­ty to meet ever-chang­ing con­sumer needs.

“Equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers like SIG are increas­ing­ly lever­ag­ing Indus­tri­al Inter­net of Things solu­tions to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves through supe­ri­or after-sales ser­vice,” said Dan Lohmey­er, SVP Dig­i­tal Prod­uct Man­age­ment at GE Dig­i­tal. “GE Digital’s Asset Per­for­mance Man­age­ment and ServiceMax’s Field Ser­vice Man­age­ment soft­ware help OEMs ensure their installed base of equip­ment is per­form­ing opti­mal­ly, and their field ser­vice resources are man­aged effi­cient­ly. Our inte­grat­ed solu­tion allows SIG to detect and cor­rect poten­tial equip­ment issues in advance, before they result in unplanned cus­tomer down­time, delight­ing end-cus­tomers through improved OEE and dri­ving improved NPS scores for SIG.”

A modular solution for maintenance

Plant 360 Asset Man­age­ment is a mod­u­lar solu­tion designed to improve fill­ing line reli­a­bil­i­ty and avail­abil­i­ty while reduc­ing costs. The Con­nec­tor mod­ule enables the col­lec­tion of dig­i­tal data, which is loaded into the Predix Cloud – GE Digital’s cloud plat­form. From here, the data can be retrieved and eval­u­at­ed at any time by SIG’s reli­a­bil­i­ty engi­neer­ing team. This mod­ule can also be used for SIG’s oth­er Smart Fac­to­ry solu­tion, Plant 360 Con­troller, which enables man­u­fac­tur­ers to mon­i­tor, con­trol and opti­mise every angle of their fill­ing plant operations.

The Smart Main­te­nance mod­ule is based on a soft­ware-sup­port­ed holis­tic process called Main­te­nance & Asset Data Ana­lyt­ics as well as an Asset Man­age­ment Cock­pit. This ensures cus­tomers have one data source for all main­te­nance-relat­ed activ­i­ties. The third mod­ule is called Smart Per­for­mance and is based on Asset Health Mon­i­tor­ing and Pre­dic­tive Asset Data Ana­lyt­ics, which will pro­vide an opti­mal plat­form for pre­dic­tive main­te­nance in the future.

Optimising assets at every stage

Togeth­er, the three mod­ules will enable high­er asset reli­a­bil­i­ty and avail­abil­i­ty. The solu­tion ensures a direct link between con­di­tion-based and pre­dic­tive main­te­nance alerts in APM and the work being sched­uled for field-ser­vice engi­neers in FSM. This helps trans­late alerts into effi­cient action on the ground and ensures field ser­vice teams receive as much advance notice as pos­si­ble of an issue, which they can address before it impacts a customer’s oper­a­tions. For exam­ple, defined wear­ing parts will no longer be replaced at fixed main­te­nance inter­vals. Instead, they will only be replaced when the data indi­cates a cer­tain degree of wear.

“With Plant 360 Asset Man­age­ment, any changes to equip­ment strate­gies – for exam­ple, chang­ing ser­vice inter­vals or main­te­nance steps – can be quick­ly reflect­ed in new FSM work,” said Klaus Andresen, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent Glob­al Tech­nol­o­gy at SIG. “This improves the effi­cien­cy and effec­tive­ness of the over­all SIG main­te­nance process. Data cap­tured by field-ser­vice work­ers is imme­di­ate­ly avail­able for analy­sis by APM and the glob­al SIG reli­a­bil­i­ty engi­neer­ing team, allow­ing us to bet­ter and more quick­ly detect emerg­ing issues and trig­ger pre­ven­ta­tive steps.”

SIG Plant 360 Asset Man­age­ment is being launched for the first time in the Mid­dle East with Almarai, one of Sau­di Arabia’s largest food and bev­er­age pro­duc­ers, as start of the glob­al rollout.

Robert Ross, Man­u­fac­tur­ing Man­ag­er Dairy and Juice at Almarai: “Dig­i­tal Solu­tions are vital for us to analyse exact­ly what is hap­pen­ing in our plant and going for­ward to pro­duce reli­ably. The aspi­ra­tional part­ner­ship with SIG & GE will great­ly help us in root cause analy­sis and in pro­vid­ing valid answers. This will ensure reli­able pro­duc­tion and to improve our OEE. We are very proud to be an ear­ly adopter of this cut­ting-edge solution.”Plant 360 Asset Man­age­ment is one of sev­er­al val­ue-added solu­tions with­in SIG’s Smart Fac­to­ry seg­ment, which is designed to help man­u­fac­tur­ers meet the chal­lenge of increas­ing out­put and dri­ving down costs in today’s com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment. The solu­tion-dri­ven Smart Fac­to­ry plat­form aims to deliv­er IoT-enabled sys­tems and tech­ni­cal ser­vices that trans­form fill­ing plants into con­nect­ed fac­to­ries that offer the high­est effi­cien­cy, flex­i­bil­i­ty and quality.