If you follow news around the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or digital transformation, you’ve undoubtedly heard that around 70% of these projects fail to one degree or another. Maple Leaf Foods, Canada’s largest producer of prepared meats, found that by focusing on a specific key performance indicator (KPI), it was able to reduce its expected timeline for a return on investment from one year to three months. The KPI Maple Leaf Foods focused on was yield via reductions in waste and loss. In a presentation at Aveva World 2023, Blair Hembruff, president of Cygnus Consulting Inc., the system integrator that worked with Maple Leaf Foods on this project, said, “We initially thought we would put all these IoT sensors in and send their data to the cloud for AI (artificial intelligence) analysis directed at specific yield improvements. But Andy [Andrew Thorne, solutions architect at Maple Leaf Foods] said: ‘Hey, we already have a full MES (manufacturing execution system) in place, do we really need a full IoT implementation?’” That question led the project team to instead focus on leveraging the MES to access all the plant’s process data and view it in an MES context before sending it […]
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