Tetra Pak pioneers new generation of digital technologies to boost customer efficiency

Powered by Microsoft technology, these breakthrough digital solutions will boost manufacturers’ efficiency, cut costs, ensure food safety, and ultimately drive their business forward.

The new services will focus on improving the ability to predict machine failures, accelerating response times and giving the customer faster access to Tetra Pak’s global expertise.

“Digital technologies are revolutionising every industry, and it’s exciting to make the latest innovations work for our customers. We are pleased to be the first to launch digitalised services, offering customers reduced costs, enhanced efficiency, and peace-of-mind,” said Dennis Jönsson, president and CEO, Tetra Pak.

Latest services include:

Tetra Pak adopts Microsoft HoloLens to speed-up issue resolution for food manufacturers

Tetra Pak is revolutionising its issues diagnosis and resolution service, using mixed reality to reduce machine downtime and productivity loss for the customer, and protecting them against risks to food safety and quality.

Armed with Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headsets, Tetra Pak on-site service engineers are now able to work “alongside” the company’s global experts who specialise in the problem they are trying to resolve.

This means that from anywhere in the world, a service engineer can “beam in” the right expert, who then sees and hears everything in real time, and guides the on-site work without ever leaving their desk.

“Our customers operate in a complex landscape where quality is essential and production lines are sophisticated. Using the disruptive innovation of Microsoft HoloLens, customers around the world can now access the whole network of our specialists wherever they are, through the Tetra Pak service engineers,” said Johan Nilsson, vice president at Tetra Pak Services.

“We are excited to bring the transformative power of mixed reality and HoloLens to Tetra Pak customers to help them transform their business and enhance their service engineers’ capabilities,” said Caglayan Arkan, general manager of Worldwide Manufacturing at Microsoft.

The HoloLens can be used not only to respond to customer issues but also for installations and regular preventative maintenance.

Tetra Pak is piloting the service in 2017 with 50 HoloLens devices, in the Greater Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, and plans to roll-out to more markets next year.

Tetra Pak’s new Condition Monitoring service slashes time and cuts costs for food and beverage manufacturers

Tetra Pak has also launched a new Condition Monitoring service to help food and beverage manufacturers predict machine failures before they occur. This cuts machine downtime and costs related to maintenance or unexpected failures.

A true game changer based on Microsoft Azure Cloud, Tetra Pak’s Condition Monitoring service provides real-time analysis of operational performance data from more than 5,000 connected filling machine lines around the world.

This is then used to advise customers on their maintenance needs in a more timely and effective way than was previously possible, allowing them to order parts in advance, schedule manpower, and plan other repairs during the scheduled downtime.

Trial programmes of the new service are already demonstrating strong results. Tetra Pak started a six-month pilot in January 2016, supporting 17 lines across 10 customers in Europe and the Americas with the new service.

During this period, downtime was eliminated by up to 48 hours for each line, saving up to 30,000 Euros ($32,600) for the customer.