P&G turns to artificial intelligence for digital manufacturing

After 184 years of development, Procter & Gamble (P&G) has grown into one of the world's largest consumer goods manufacturers. By 2021, its global revenue will exceed US$76 billion, and its employees More than 100,000 people. Its brands are household names, including Charmin, Crest, Dawn, Febreze, Gillette, Olay, Pampers and Tide.

In the summer of 2022, P&G entered into a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to transform its digital manufacturing platform. Microsoft stated that they will use the industrial Internet of Things, digital twins, data and artificial intelligence to provide P&G with faster product delivery, improve customer satisfaction, while increasing productivity and reducing costs, thereby creating the future of digital manufacturing.

Vittorio Cretella, Chief Information Officer of P&G, said, “The primary purpose of our digital transformation is to create outstanding solutions to the daily problems of millions of consumers around the world, while creating value for all stakeholders. To this end, We leverage technologies such as data, artificial intelligence and automation to increase agility in all aspects of our business while accelerating innovation and increasing productivity.” Check product quality, maximize equipment resiliency while avoiding waste, and optimize energy and water use in manufacturing plants. Cretella said P&G will make manufacturing smarter by enabling scalable predictive quality, predictive maintenance, controlled release, touchless operations and manufacturing sustainability optimization. Until now, he said, these things have not been done on this scale in manufacturing.

Intelligent Manufacturing at Scale

The company has launched pilot projects in Egypt, India, Japan and the United States using Azure IoT Hub and IoT Edge to help manufacturing technicians analyze insights to improve infant care and production of paper products.

For example, the production of diapers involves assembling multiple layers of materials at high speed and precision to ensure optimal absorbency, leakage resistance and comfort. The new Industrial IoT platform uses machine telemetry and high-speed analytics to continuously monitor production lines to provide early detection and prevention of potential problems in the flow of materials. This in turn improves cycle times, reduces network losses and ensures quality while increasing operator productivity.

P&G is also piloting the use of industrial IoT, advanced algorithms, machine learning and predictive analytics to improve productivity in tissue production. P&G can now better predict the length of finished paper towels.

Large-scale smart manufacturing is a challenge. It requires acquiring data from equipment sensors, applying advanced analytics to derive descriptive and predictive insights, and automating corrective actions. The end-to-end process requires several steps, including data integration and algorithm development, training, and deployment. It also involves large amounts of data and near real-time processing.

Cretella said, "The secret to scale is to reduce complexity by providing common components at the edge and in the Microsoft cloud, which engineers can use to deploy different use cases to specific manufacturing environments - and No need to create everything from scratch."

Using Microsoft Azure as a foundation, P&G is now able to digitize and integrate data from more than 100 manufacturing sites around the world and enhance real-time capabilities with artificial intelligence, machine learning and edge computing services Visibility. This, in turn, will enable P&G employees to analyze production data and leverage artificial intelligence to support decisions that drive improvements and exponential impact.

Acquisition of this level of data at scale is rare in the consumer goods industry, Cretella added.

Data and artificial intelligence are the foundation of digital

In fact, P&G took the first step in the artificial intelligence journey more than five years ago. It has passed what Cretella calls an "experimental phase," with solutions at scale and increasingly sophisticated AI applications. Data and artificial intelligence have since become central to the company's digital strategy.

Cretella said, “We use artificial intelligence in all aspects of our business to predict outcomes and increasingly take action through automation. In addition, we also have applications in the area of ​​product innovation, through modeling and simulation , we can shorten the time to develop new formulas from months to weeks; use artificial intelligence to deliver brand information to every consumer at the right time, in the right channel, and with the right content. P&G engineers also use Azure AI To ensure quality control and equipment resiliency on the production line.”

P&G’s secret to scale relies on technology, including investing in a scalable data and artificial intelligence environment centered on a cross-functional data lake, Cretella said, P&G Another hidden secret relies on the skills of hundreds of talented data scientists and engineers who know the company's business inside and out. To that end, P&G's future will embrace AI automation, which will free its data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers from manual, labor-intensive tasks, allowing them to focus more on other areas where they can add value.

Cretella added that AI-powered automation also enables us to deliver consistent quality and manage deviations and risks. Additionally, AI automation will enable an increasing number of employees to take advantage of these capabilities, making the benefits of AI pervasive throughout the company.

Leveraging the Power of People

Another element of achieving agility at scale is P&G’s “hybrid” approach to building teams within IT teams. P&G balances the organization between central teams and teams embedded in its categories and markets. Central teams create enterprise platforms and technology foundations, while embedded teams use these platforms and foundations to build digital solutions that capture business opportunities specific to their departments. Cretella also noted that the company prioritizes internal talent, particularly in areas such as data science, cloud management, cybersecurity, software engineering and DevOps.

To accelerate P&G’s transformation, Microsoft and P&G established a Digital Enablement Office (DEO) composed of experts from both organizations. The DEO will serve as an incubator to create high-priority business scenarios in the areas of product manufacturing and packaging processes that can be implemented across P&G. Cretella considers it more of a project management office than a center of excellence. Because it coordinates the efforts of all the different innovation teams working on business use cases and ensures effective scaling deployment of the developed proven solutions.

Finally, Cretella had some advice for CIOs trying to drive digital transformation in their own businesses: First, be motivated and find your energy in your passion for the business and how to apply technology to create value; Second, have the agility to learn and a true desire to learn; and finally, invest in people (your team, colleagues, and even your boss) because technology alone doesn’t change anything; talent is the key to everything.

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