Discovery Update

It is now one year since we communicated here our Program Discovery, and as promised, we would like to give an update on its progress.
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As a reminder, we have three main challenges in our top five: low availability of people for any type of jobs in our geography, energy, and waste. With the new technologies within Program Discovery and its training program we believe we will overcome these barriers. We are transforming people into a problem-solving digitally trained team.

We have and update on these installed technologies:

1. New skimmer with integrated in-line standardization, heat exchanger and pasteurizer.
2. New Wastewater Treatment Plant systems and management model
3. Artificial Intelligence Spray-drying management technology and new burners
4. Lab equipment for raw material and final product analysis
5. Green Cold-Water system (heat absorption, new chillers, and photovoltaic power)
6. Integrated Industry 4.0 Data Analytics platform, MES, and Manufacturing ERP

We are finally working with our new inline standardization and separation installation doubling our capacity, thanks to @tetra and @sive. We are much more energy-efficient, we reduce greatly the resources in an entire phase of the production process liberating them for other tasks, eliminate 3 cleaning processes (and related time/water/energy) and are reducing waste significantly in terms of product components.

This helps not only to reduce losses but also to reduce the amount of solids that go to our wastewater treatment plant, which, also under the Discovery Program, we have finally changed to work on continuous mode installing new equipment from @liberaqua in the last few months, together with a new management model, helping reduce our environmental impact greatly.

Also, we are already in a test mode for our newly installed and configured Artificial Intelligence Optipartner spray drying management technology by @gea linked to the new automated burners installed last year and are already receiving real time data to support the so-wanted increased energy efficiency and productivity.

We have installed critical lab equipment by @foss, altogether in use for around 75% of joint potential, that reduce time spent in some of the analysis from 4 hours to 5 minutes allowing freed time for our quality department to concentrate in maintaining our high standards with line presence and prevention.

The project “Green Cold Water” is also on-going: after complementing our installed systems with the new technology we are moving 100% from ammonia-based to a heat recovery system and photovoltaic powered cold-water generation with the support of @eneor. Equipment is ordered and being worked on, and the clock is ticking for installation time.

Last, but not least, we can finally see in real time all data coming from the production and utilities sensors in our data analytics platform from @helix, from which we can also see alarms, trends and can analyze the most critical information to reduce down-time, predict potential failures and prevent future ones. Given the fact that the fully integrated platform includes a new MES for which we have a pilot test and that we installed recently a completely new manufacturing module of our ERP @primavera, this is a very complex part of Discovery, but the most exciting one! 

On most of these systems we are continuing with our change-management and training plan with all teams involved. Doing this right, we will enable our people to grow personally and professionally and our organization to do much more, in a much better way.