Digital Thread for Design, Engineering & Manufacturing for Consumer and Cosmetics Industries

Consumer industry faces many challenges: Performance analysis of 34 of the world’s top 50 consumer goods companies shows that 85% of those big companies had seen a decline in either revenues, profits or both. Only 15% managed to escape unscathed. Due to the new health and environmental awareness of consumers, companies need fast time to market to responds to their needs. There is also a trend of smaller batch sizes to cater to diversified and to some degree individualized needs

This means that consumer goods companies are innovating with new recipes and ingredients. Changing recipes of ingredients many times requires a revamp or reestablishment of engineering practices.

Smart process design uses digital representation of the manufacturing unit operations to evaluate performance of those steps. Starting from advanced engineering simulation to create a performance twin of the process, one can perform many trials for improved design to meet process requirements and optimize the operations. This performance twin then helps in tearing down the walls to the manufacturing process itself, resulting in an operation twin. Through automation, control simulation and virtual commissioning, the transformed recipes can be handed over to manufacturing sites rapidly.

In this presentation, we will describe what such a transformation means as well as the tools that are necessary to carry those out. We will also present a few case studies where it had been successfully utilized.