Digital transformation in food processing? Think automated audits

Packaging company Sealed Air is best known for its Bubble Wrap and Cryovac brands. The company’s Food Care division targets the packaging lines and operation of food processing facilities — a highly manual world. But with the support of executive leadership, Marc Hamer, global CIO, chief digital officer, and corporate vice president of customer experience, is driving a digital transformation that helps its customers improve product yield.

Sealed Air

“I have never been what I would call a back-office CIO. I’ve never really been interested in just working on infrastructure or just cutting costs or just putting an ERP system in,” Hamer says. “I really look at how you use technology to change how a company operates, to make that company run more efficiently, to help that company go to market in different channels.”

That’s becoming a consistent refrain in the manufacturing industry. Grand View Research forecasts the global smart manufacturing market will grow from $172 billion in 2016 to $395 billion by 2025, driven in large part by a focus on improving production efficiency and visibility across the entire value chain. The research firm predicts digital plants and advanced manufacturing techniques will power a fourth industrial revolution.

Improving performance through digitalization is the driver behind the Sealed Air’s CogniPRO Services initiative, which has received a CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence.

CogniPRO consists of:

• A platform of digitally enabled services built on vision technology, real-time data analysis, and machine and cloud connectivity.
• A method to measure complex operations in real-time, analyze those operations based on intelligent reference standards, and provide continuous feedback based on that analysis.
• Automated solutions that can inform manual, skilled processes, or be integrated into automated equipment processes.

“We sell a lot of equipment to food processing plants,” Hamer explains. “We have all this equipment producing a lot of great things: bags, sealers, packaging that they put their food in. But they don’t see any type of data from that. There’s no value from the machines in terms of measuring.”

CogniPRO is an effort to change that.

Packaging company Sealed Air is best known for its Bubble Wrap and Cryovac brands. The company’s Food Care division targets the packaging lines and operation of food processing facilities — a highly manual world. But with the support of executive leadership, Marc Hamer, global CIO, chief digital officer, and corporate vice president of customer experience, is driving a digital transformation that helps its customers improve product yield.

Sealed Air

“I have never been what I would call a back-office CIO. I’ve never really been interested in just working on infrastructure or just cutting costs or just putting an ERP system in,” Hamer says. “I really look at how you use technology to change how a company operates, to make that company run more efficiently, to help that company go to market in different channels.”

That’s becoming a consistent refrain in the manufacturing industry. Grand View Research forecasts the global smart manufacturing market will grow from $172 billion in 2016 to $395 billion by 2025, driven in large part by a focus on improving production efficiency and visibility across the entire value chain. The research firm predicts digital plants and advanced manufacturing techniques will power a fourth industrial revolution.

Improving performance through digitalization is the driver behind the Sealed Air’s CogniPRO Services initiative, which has received a CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence.

CogniPRO consists of:

• A platform of digitally enabled services built on vision technology, real-time data analysis, and machine and cloud connectivity.
• A method to measure complex operations in real-time, analyze those operations based on intelligent reference standards, and provide continuous feedback based on that analysis.
• Automated solutions that can inform manual, skilled processes, or be integrated into automated equipment processes.

“We sell a lot of equipment to food processing plants,” Hamer explains. “We have all this equipment producing a lot of great things: bags, sealers, packaging that they put their food in. But they don’t see any type of data from that. There’s no value from the machines in terms of measuring.”

CogniPRO is an effort to change that.

For example, while humans do a better job of carving meat than machines could do, there’s still room for improvement. Sealed Air’s CogniPRO Focus system measures and monitors the carving process to provide immediate feedback to line workers.

The solution uses a camera and imaging system to capture and analyze the yield on each individual carcass as it comes through the line. It analyzes the captured imagery against a specification and then visual indicators alert the workers about their carving performance. The system also provides supervisors and management with detailed reports, including trend analyses, through an online portal.

Before CogniPRO Focus, line supervisors were responsible for performing manual audits of trimming, a process that was time-consuming and sampled only one percent of production. As a result, corrective action training was often delayed until days later, which in turn meant the customer was losing days of valuable yield, in addition to the time and money required for off-line training. CogniPRO Focus provides immediate feedback on 95 percent of throughput.

Sealed Air says the system has helped customers improve premium product yield between one percent and three percent, which typically equates to a $1 million annual savings for a large plant. In addition, Sealed Air customers, like Butterball, say CogniPRO Focus has increased employee engagement on the line.

That’s an important benefit, Hamer says, because skilled workers are extremely valuable in meat processing, but the industry suffers from high turnover rates due to the working conditions.

“It’s very manual in nature, and there’s high turnover,” Hamer says.

CogniPRO Focus is just the start. Sealed Air sees the initiative as laying the foundation for a global platform for centralized digital products. CogniPRO Focus has helped it increase revenue from existing customers with whom the company already has maximum share of packaging solutions, and it hopes to carry that forward in other arenas, including the addition of subscription-based services that enhance the value of existing equipment and materials. 

“This really brings us to a whole different level of strategic partnership [with our customers],” Hamer says.

“The biggest thing is to lead,” he says. “That sounds very, very simple. But there are not a lot of CIOs, or chief digital officers for that matter, that will challenge the status quo. What people need to understand is that a CIO coming into a company has a skillset that no one else on the senior team has. Think more about how you can impact the company than how you can impact IT. Think company first, IT second. That’s how you get the CEO’s attention.”