Efficiency boosted for Food and Beverage

Aavin Dairy is a co-operative institution of the Tamil Nadu Co-operative Milk Producers’ Federation Limited (TCMPF) whose objective is to promote the economic development of the farming community by procurement of milk from villages, processing of milk and manufacturing of milk products.

India’s dairy industry is on a high growth path with a 15% compounded annual growth (CAGR) expected over 2016 to 2020 and is set to outperform global production according to a report by Edelweiss. The country is expected to surpass the European Union to emerge as the largest dairy producer by 2020.

Acknowledging the growth of the dairy sector in the country, the government of India has implemented the Central Scheme National Dairy Plan, Phase 1 during 2012 to 17 to improve productivity of dairy cooperatives. Investment by private players in the domestic dairy sector is also expected to further augment milk productivity. Automation and technology adoption are expected to be a critical piece in this upsurge.

Schneider Electric believes that technology adoption plays a critical role in accelerating this growth with a focus on ‘smart manufacturing processes’ to help in building efficiency and increasing the output volumes in the Food and Beverage (F&B) industry.

This is being done through Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure for Food and Beverage that provides advanced digital technologies thereby enabling transparency, security, regulatory compliance and reliability.

Keeping in line with this agenda, Aavin Dairy has recently deployed Schneider Electric’s solution to improve productivity levels of its manufacturing unit. Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Hybrid DCS is an edge solution which is a single automation system to engineer, operate, and maintain your entire infrastructure for a sustainable, productive and market-agile plant.

It is a scalable and flexible system architecture for future capacity expansion, ensuring object-based programming using specific libraries for liquid food processing, and for easy maintenance and operation.

Speaking on the benefits of technology deployment, Dr S Selvaraj, General Manager CDCMPU Ltd (Aavin), said: “We wanted to improve on the accuracy in milk processing and uniformity in end product quality as well as our plant’s operational efficiency, flexibility and scalability.

EcoStruxure Hybrid DCS helped us achieve this while improving our operational efficiency by 50% since all the data is monitored and visualised and turned into actionable insights. This has improved asset management and energy efficiency, further increasing processing capacity from 0.2 to 0.3 million liters per day and with the capacity to reach 0.5.”

The dairy industry is facing a series of challenges including limited monitoring affecting operational efficiency, lack of visibility on energy consumption, and scalability. Digital transformation with corresponding change in the business model provides new revenue and value-producing opportunities.

In order to improve efficiencies and to ensure optimisation of production that can be safely processed, stored and delivered, the F&B supply chains need to be realigned and digitised.

Speaking about the solution deployment at Aavin, Latish Babu, Head, Strategic Customers and Segments, Greater India Zone, said: “To surpass EU levels of production and become the largest dairy producer by 2020, India needs strong business models and robust scalability in this industry. The change in consumer habits and marketplace is increasingly shaping the demands in the F&B segment and manufacturers are faced with challenges of producing competitive, profitable, safe and desirable products.

“Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure aims at addressing these by powering the F&B including the dairy industry with advanced digital technologies that ensure transparency, security, regulatory compliance and reliability.”