GE Digital’s APM Health & Strategy solutions power leading packaging OEM’s monitoring service

When you're talking about the global food and beverage industry, there are a few words that come to mind: tasty and massive. With a combined market value of over $7 trillion, these industries are some of the most important in the world. And when it comes to keeping those businesses up and running, you need equipment that is reliable and can stand up to constant use. That's where SIG comes in.

Headquartered in Switzerland, SIG is a global packaging solutions provider with nearly (EURO)3B in revenues. In 2021, SIG opened a new line of service, called Plant 360 Asset Health Monitoring. The goal was to help end customers keep up with the demands of packaging more than 48 billion items annually. And with the growth of the packaging industry, customers are constantly demanding optimizations in their production sites. To achieve this, unplanned downtime must be kept to a minimum, with overall equipment efficiency and output at a maximum.  

"In the food and beverage industry, a reliable equipment is tremendously important," said Dr. Christian Grefrath, Senior Global Product Manager and responsible for SIG’s Plan 360 Asset Health Monitoring service. "At the end of the process, any unplanned interruption can be extremely costly with loss of quality, product and sales, or additional expenses from overtime."

To help combat unplanned downtime for its customers, SIG partnered with GE Digital on its Plant 360 Asset Health Monitoring service.

Using GE Digital’s APM Strategy solution, SIG established a Failure Mode, Effects & Criticality Analysis (FMECA) methodology for the filling lines. An example of this is to determine which assemblies or parts within assemblies are most critical and could possibly lead to failure and what the causes and signs of failures are.

Using this methodology, SIG is able to maintain equipment more accurately and identify the optimal time to replace or repair a part. In addition, this helps further standardize and automate all processes such as the deployment planning of technicians. This leads to improved plant availability and lower costs since maintenance is carried out at the optimum time and only when the part really needs to be replaced.

GE Digital’s APM Health solution enables SIG to establish reliability-centered maintenance. Bi-directional connectivity to the programmable logic controller (PLC) within the SIG machines enables data to be retrieved every second and streamed to the cloud. Here, GE Digital’s APM Health solution can monitor systems, evaluating machine data and triggering service events based upon predefined rules and the FMECA methodology.

SIG Reliability Center experts then examine the findings and work with the end customer to resolve the issue. Resolution may include the customer addressing a simple component exchange, or might involve a remote or on-site inspection from one of SIG's field service technicians in region. After the order is completed, it is then recorded in the APM system.

SIG’s Plant 360 Asset Health Monitoring service significantly reduces operating costs by optimizing production line health through condition-based monitoring and regular reports. For example, one of SIG’s customers in the Middle East and Africa region reported a 20 percent reduction in unplanned downtime in just one year.

SIG selected GE Digital after an extensive evaluation of IIoT and AI vendors. Ultimately, the flexibility of the solution and number of monitoring and diagnostic (M&D) centers relying on GE Digital’s APM solution convinced the team that the solution was right for their M&D service offering.

"We were impressed with the GE Power M&D Center in Atlanta, Georgia," said Michael Körner, Sr. Project Manager and team leader for the Digital Service Solutions and the Reliability Center. "If the GE Digital solution can monitor nearly 1,000 gas turbines responsible for powering homes, businesses and cities globally, we knew we could trust it with the SIG brand."

Nearly all of SIG machines (1300+ fillers in the field) can be connected to the APM system and to the SIG Plant 360 Asset Health Monitoring service. Up to 100 tags capturing everything from the mandrel wheel, filling station or H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) unit on SIG machines are possible.

"SIG's application of GE Digital's Health and Strategy APM software demonstrates the sheer versatility of our technology," said Linda Rae, General Manager of the Power Generation and Oil & Gas business at GE Digital. "We're proud to be a key ingredient in the Plant 360 services and partner with SIG as they strive to create and deliver packaging in a safe, sustainable and affordable way."

Dr. Christian Grefrath noted SIG is currently working on extending the Asset Health Monitoring service to predictive maintenance powered by GE Digital’s APM Reliability Plus solution. This software uses digital twins to anticipate failures much sooner than condition-based monitoring, using time-to-action forecast analytics to create an even greater window of opportunity to schedule maintenance and avoid unplanned downtime.