Digitalization Increases Production Efficiency

Improved production efficiency does not only mean an increase in the volume of production.

“Even more importantly than quantity, improved production efficiency means quality – that is, that the consumer gets a product that meets their expectations”, states Antti Varis, Director of Process Business Area at Roima Intelligence.

In less than ten years, Roima has grown into a trendsetter in industrial digitalization with the support of 250 professionals. The company’s annual revenue amounts to approximately 32 million euros.

Roima has, among others, delivered one of the world’s most versatile and user-friendly manufacturing operations management systems to the Finnish food company Snellman Group.

“Snellman’s guiding principle for continuous improvement in production is that it is easy to do things right and difficult to do them wrong. At Snellman’s subsidiary Kokkikartano, the system tells our employees, for example, how to make ham casserole and measures whether the work has been done correctly. Once the mix has been baked, the system ensures that the time between baking and cooling is not too long. Based on the measurements, employees receive feedback on their work, and production is continuously improved. When the system supports job-flow control, things like job rotation and, for example, the induction of seasonal workers are easier and less susceptible to quality deviations”, explains John Aspnäs, Snellman’s Chief Information Officer.

Production digitalization is not an IT solution but always part of the continuous improvement of the company and people. It has business objectives and performance indicators to measure how well the targets have been achieved.

Digitalization means both traditional collection of production data for corporate management and real-time development of production based on the obtained information.

In global production, the processes of different factories are harmonized as far as possible so that some of them can be driven by, for example, an MES or Azure IoT system offered as a cloud service. Harmonization requires management commitment to genuinely developing the operational activities across the company.

“Corporate management values standardized production processes of equally high quality everywhere. When digital systems become a genuine part of production, best practices can be harmonized across all sites”, Varis summarizes.