Siemens demonstrates digital and integrated value chain for the beverage industry

Rapidly changing customer demands are forcing companies to turn around ever more customized products within the shortest possible time, and all to a consistently optimum standard of quality. The key to addressing this challenge is digitalization. This allows companies to simulate, test and optimize products, production processes and plants in a completely virtual environment on the basis of a "digital twin".

Using examples taken from the dairy, brewery and soft drink sector, visitors to the Siemens booth will be able to experience at first hand how digitalization enhances flexibility and allows even customized, individual products to be mass-produced. Visitors will also find out more about the future of the brewery system Braumat, the tried and tested control system which operates with the utmost reliability in hundreds of breweries around the world. Siemens will also be demonstrating how drone technology can be used to take pictures of existing facilities, which – thanks to technology from Siemens partner Bentley Systems – can be transformed into three-dimensional images. These images are then integrated into the digital world to create a digital twin of an already existing plant. This technology can be used by the beverage industry – and also right across all the manufacturing and process industries – to significantly increase innovation speed and productivity, and define completely new business models. This development can also benefit machine and plant builders, and allow them to pass the advantages on to their customers.

Siemens will also be demonstrating at the Drinktec how companies can use digitalization solutions to respond with the utmost flexibility to changing market demands, such as the growing diversity of flavors. Focusing on the dairy industry, the solutions on show at the Drinktec cover everything from milk processing to bottling and packaging to labeling. Visitors to the booth can discover for themselves the degree to which soft drinks or dairy products can be individually produced. The possibilities opened up by digitalization allow consumers to design products and packaging in keeping with their own individual taste. Siemens is opening up this window on the future using the example of milk processing – from the product concept through the manufacturing process and filling through to packaging and labeling, all with the benefit of end-to-end automation and data utilization. Digital twins of the products, plants and production lines are simulated and optimized with special software. Using several different processing stations, Siemens will be illustrating how this process works for visitors to the booth. Fair-goers can also experience how KPIs of relevance for the whole production line or a particular process element can be depicted and evaluated using specific apps in the cloud-based open IoT operating system MindSphere.

This press release and further information are available at www.siemens.com/press/drinktec