Tetra Pak enhances its industry advantage and sustainability goals with Azure IoT

The company’s packaging lines kitchen shelves and refrigerators everywhere, and Tetra Pak continues to build on its legacy of innovation. Today, sustainability is the next frontier for the company. “Tetra Pak is going through a major transformation in sustainable manufacturing,” says Peter Stolt, Director of Digitalization and Automation at Tetra Pak. “We’ve already eliminated the production of plastic straws in some markets, and our next ambition is to create highly recyclable, fiber-based packaging.”

Tetra Pak is committed to invest approximately €100 million per year over the next 5 to10 years to develop more sustainable packaging solutions. As part of this transformation, the company invested in Microsoft Azure IoT solutions such as Azure IoT Hub to create “smart factories” that drive sustainability across its whole organization. And for connected customer solutions, Tetra Pak uses Azure IoT Edge devices to bring advanced operational efficiency to customers’ facilities around the world with solutions for predictive maintenance and monitoring overall equipment effectiveness.

Accessing a single version of truth with Azure IoT Hub

Today, Tetra Pak uses IoT Hub as part of its core solution for gaining a single, holistic view of productivity, safety, and quality data on a global scale. “We now have a unified view of a factory’s performance on the daily shift, factory, cluster, and global level,” says Stolt. “So far, we’ve used IoT Hub as part of our dashboarding solution for simpler global analytics. The benefits of having that one view, besides the pure time savings, is that we can trust the data, making us more agile and quicker in our decision making.”

Tetra Pak employees at facilities worldwide use the insights made available by IoT Hub and surfaced in Power BI to work more efficiently. Previously, multiple controllers had to spend days compiling data to create monthly factory reports. Today, 24 Internet of Things (IoT)–enabled Tetra Pak facilities access that data from factory lines in near real time, so decision makers have instantaneous access to the information they need to optimize operations. “Managers use IoT data from facilities to gain a deeper understanding of operations and improve productivity,” says Stolt. “It creates a huge time savings.”

With a global view of factories’ performance, employees can quickly pinpoint potential issues, creating value for Tetra Pak. “This global data also enables us to do simpler loss deployments,” says Stolt. “So, if a cluster manager who oversees facilities in several countries notices that the cluster’s productivity is down, they can immediately click down a level and see what factory is lagging behind and then drill down even further to see what operation in that factory is affecting performance.”

Improving compliance with operational technology standards

Tetra Pak operational technology (OT) security managers work to ensure factory compliance with the company’s ISA-95 security standards. Previously, they calculated a sum for each factory that indicated its level of compliance. Today, security managers at Tetra Pak’s 24 smart factories worldwide use IoT Hub and Power BI to monitor security and compliance indicators in real time, and they can then act on these insights to improve compliance.

“In the past, we manually calculated the compliance score of each factory using often unreliable data, which made it difficult to gain insights into various factors,” says Stolt. “Today, the data we need is connected to the Azure cloud platform and displays in Power BI. Security managers can now access rich and easily digestible insights at any time, which they’ve used to improve compliance by up to 15 percent.”

Previously, managers might calculate an individual factory’s compliance score once a year. “We could have had serious security gaps that went unnoticed for a year,” says Stolt. “The combination of Azure IoT infrastructure and Power BI has had a profound effect on OT security, all from a simple dashboard.” With this new visibility into global factory data, security managers no longer have to wait for an internal audit to assess and rectify compliance issues.

And because Tetra Pak made this data available to member factories for each cluster, more people have access to insights that can help the company improve benchmarks toward its total productivity maintenance goals. “The factories check each other’s performance all the time, and when they see a factory make positive gains, they’ll contact them to learn what they’re doing,” says Stolt. “The availability of this data drives best practice behavior very nicely.”

Meeting security and compliance requirements with nested Azure IoT Edge devices

Tetra Pak’s IoT journey began with a desire to use Azure IoT solutions to embrace the promise of Industry 4.0 for safer, more efficient operations in factories worldwide. The company faced a challenge when it came to securing the flow of data collected from devices to the cloud, and ultimately to an analytics tool, while still adhering to strict network isolation needs. As an ISA-95 compliant organization, Tetra Pak needed an IoT edge solution that would secure connections between its production networks and the cloud to transport machine data and to run software on its edge devices.

“Security and compliance are nonnegotiable for Tetra Pak,” says Stolt. “We wanted to use the Azure IoT Edge solution on our production line, but our requirements for protecting our OT environment from outside threats made it difficult to get the most out of Azure IoT.”

The company’s compliance requirements were the catalyst for a new IoT Edge feature that was specifically designed to comply with the regulated ISA-95 standard for network isolation. This standard calls for networks to be layered. With the new IoT Edge feature, dubbed nested Azure IoT Edge devices, manufacturing customers can deploy IoT Edge nodes across networks that are organized in hierarchical layers. The result is continued adherence to network isolation requirements coupled with the ability to confidently encrypt, deploy, and safely run sensitive IoT workloads at the edge.

“Microsoft listened closely to our security concerns and developed the new nested Azure IoT Edge devices feature, which solved our ISA-95 compliance issues,” says Stolt. “We’ve been able to get data up to the cloud for a while, but with nesting capabilities, we can also centrally control what’s on that edge.”

Improving quality and performance with IoT innovations

Tetra Pak also turned to Azure IoT to help optimize quality and reduce defects on production lines. For example, it used image analytics and an algorithm that runs on an edge device to prevent product defects from reaching customers, improving quality overall.

“Being able to connect anything we want to Azure IoT infrastructure opens new possibilities for us to control our processes better, and ultimately, improve quality and reliability for our customers,” says Stolt. “Access to data we can trust enables the step changes in quality that our customers expect—this is where we’ve seen the biggest direct impact of IoT innovations.”

The company’s facilities will use the new nesting capabilities to make the most of algorithms that are targeted at operational efficiency. “Rolling out algorithms to multiple factories and manually making sure they always had the latest version used to be difficult,” says Stolt. “We can now use nested IoT Edge devices to centrally ensure that every factory has the latest version, and every customer gets the same quality product.”

Providing customers new services to boost manufacturing efficiency

In addition to maintaining its factories, Tetra Pak also builds and services equipment for customers who package their own products in their own facilities. Guided by the success of the company’s digitization journey so far, this area of the business is poised to embrace Azure IoT solutions. In one case, Tetra Pak has already used IoT Edge devices to provide predictive maintenance services to a customer, helping a dairy producer in Europe save approximately €55,000 by detecting and repairing malfunctions before they caused unexpected downtime.

For Magnus Wijk, System Architect IoT at Tetra Pak, the nesting capabilities in IoT Edge have become an essential part of the new services that Tetra Pak will offer ISA-95 compliant customers who want to improve operational efficiency and overall equipment effectiveness. “We’re developing a new platform to enable new digital services for our customers, and Azure IoT technology is a fundamental building block,” he says. “Tetra Pak worked closely with Microsoft on our IoT journey, and with the new nesting capabilities, we can now provide our customers the same security, quality, maintenance, and operational efficiency benefits.”

For the company and its customers, the benefits of IoT are ever-expanding, and Azure IoT solutions will support its drive toward greater efficiency. “With our investment in Azure IoT Hub, Tetra Pak now has the technology to help optimize our processes and innovate for a more sustainable future,” says Stolt.

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