The Hellenic Dairies group switches to smart factories to boost its production’s eco-efficiency 

An international group with multiple challenges

As one of Eastern Europe’s leading dairy product manufacturers, the Hellenic Dairies group experienced rapid growth upon acquiring several factories.

The traction it gained heightened the need for it to streamline management across its different production sites to achieve the same, homogenous overview of performance across all sites and fulfil the factories’ operational objectives:

  • Improve performance and increase production output
  • Cut back on water consumption and reduce environment impact
  • Ensure more efficient traceability
  • Optimise CapEx investment

 

To achieve these goals across all production sites, the Hellenic Dairies group set its sights on industrial IoT and the InUse IIoT 4.0 platform specifically.

A 10% increase in overall output thanks to the InUse IIoT platform

 

 

10 to 20%
decrease in the average amount of water used during CIP

 

-25%
less time spent on changeovers

 

5minutes

needed only to generate traceability reports

Creating a digital twin of the factory in operation

Harnessing the advantages of IoT, the first step in tackling the company’s goals was to reconcile all production data scattered throughout the factory, building a sense of digital continuity:

  • across the factory’s various departments (raw material reception, processing, packaging, etc.)
  • powered by different data sources (PLC from equipment, production software such as ERP and MES, as well as operators’ manually-input data).

Once this data had been collated, a comprehensive overview of all operations emerged, forming the IoT data structure and digital twin that would be essential to setting up specific connected services.

A portfolio of dedicated connected services

The dedicated Olympus InUse app was born of the Hellenic Dairies group’s industry expertise paired with InUse’s tech prowess in delivering industrial IoT solutions. The app combines all connected services in a single place,  covering the group factories’ many different challenges, as experienced by the production teams in their day-to-day work:

  • Tracking and analysing production performances (reports, dashboards, synoptic views, etc.)
  • Optimising changeovers duration
  • Identifying factors that impact on batch performance
  • Automating traceability reports for all production processes
  • Optimising the volumes of water used during cleaning in placeoperations

These connected services all aim to simplify and improve the work carried out by all professionals within the factories. Production managers now have access to real-time production industrial IoT dashboard features and indicators, which helps with decision-making,while operators are given contextualised instruction lists and recommendations allowing them to operate more efficiently across the production line.
The app also supports teams in achieving operational excellence by digitalising large volumes of paperwork within the factory.

“ Thanks to InUse’s industrial IoT software, we’re able to visualise, understand, and take action more quickly. We’re on the right path to significantly increasing output at our production sites in the next few months. Optimising our cleaning in place cycles, for instance, has allowed us to improve machine availability times and decrease the amounts of water used by 20%. ”

Ioannis Balodimos, Director of Production and Logistics, Hellenic Dairies Group

About the Hellenic Dairies group :

European dairy product leader Hellenic Dairies is based in Greece and owns multiple brands, the best-known of which is Olympus.

  • A European dairy product leader based in Greece
  • Seven production sites: five factories in Greece, one in Bulgaria, and one in Romania
  • Over 1,500 employees
  • Sales of over €400m