NGen investing $3 million to create analytics platform for food processing

In a bid to promote Industrial 4.0 technology adoption to Canadian manufacturers, Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen) has announced a $3-million collaborative project to develop and scale a novel production monitoring and optimization platform.

The project features $1.4 million in co-funding, NGen officials said in a news release. NGen is the industry-led organization leading Canada’s Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster.

Along with partners Saputo and Accuenergy, Panevo is building on successes from a 2020 pilot project, which was launched to address the food processing sector’s lagging adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.

The consortium will apply a new solution for determining the performance of production assets across food processing and related supply chains. The new project will create a scalable, commercially ready real-time monitoring and advanced analytics platform, which is expected to lead to significant commercial opportunities for the consortium partners.

During the project, Panevo’s ioTORQ software, which is hosted in Canada on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, will be demonstrated with support from a network of Supercluster members.

By leveraging connections within the food processing sector and related supply chains, the consortium aims to develop overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and related metrics in true real time, along with advanced machine learning analytics, to enable a step-change in productivity.

The solution primarily uses Accuenergy’s IoT gateways to readily integrate with established manufacturing operations and their production assets irrespective of type or age, facilitating a smoother transition and simpler adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.