Case Study

Döhler Goes Digital First Focusing on Resilience and Future Readiness

Döhler, a global producer of natural ingredients and ingredient systems for food and beverage industries adopted Litmus Edge as part of their technology stack to build data and digital infrastructure that is both resilient and efficient at the same time. Litmus Edge and Litmus Edge Manager helped Döhler to operate using a common namespace throughout the company. On one hand this helped Döhler do more with their data right at the edge and on the other hand provided data consistency to business-critical applications in the cloud.

Realized Incremental
Energy Savings

Food & Beverage

90% Data Compression
at the Edge

9000+ Employees

Multiple plants in 3 Months
of Project Roll-out

Multiple Global Plants

Solution Highlights

Connected all relevant shopfloor assets within minutes of plant rollout using automated processes.
Realized incremental energy savings in a key process within the first few days of use.
Common namespace enforced throughout all the plants.
Established visibility into shopfloor assets in combination with a Litmus Partner specializing in OEE optimization solutions.
90% data compression rate at the edge resulting in significant cloud cost savings.
Centralized rollout and operations management with Litmus Edge Manager.
Automated deployment process enabled an accelerated roll-out in multiple plants in just a few months of project kick-off.

Challenges

Common to most medium to large scale manufacturing companies, they had to deal with the challenge of having a heterogeneous operational environment − with several global plants at different maturity levels, varying in size and type of installed industrial assets.
Cloud and Big Data are integral to their digital transformation objectives. However, going digital first meant rising cloud costs.
Döhler is committed to sustainable practices in the Food & Beverage industry, including optimized use of water and energy resources.

How Litmus Edge made the difference

Scroll down to learn how

Speed of Deployment

Litmus Edge provides an extensive list of more than 280 built-in industrial connectors that helped Döhler solve their shopfloor device connectivity and data collection challenges. For each new plant where Döhler rolls out Litmus, connectivity to the shopfloor assets is established within minutes based on built-in Litmus Edge drivers and a highly automated template-based rollout process. In a span of three months since initial project kick-off, Litmus Edge connected to a heterogeneous fleet of shopfloor assets across multiple plants of Döhler’s global network, thus bringing all the connected plants on a common data infrastructure. This helped Döhler to compare KPIs collected across multiple sites from different assets and drive data-led process improvements. The rollout has accelerated since then expanding to several other plants too.

“Litmus Edge makes it simpler to repeat a success story from one plant to the next and many others in quick succession. The Litmus team understood our goals and integrated seamlessly with our operational and IT environment – delivering greater ROI on existing systems and tools."

Jan Krall, Head of Digital Transformation

Enabling a Trustable OEE Metric

Once device connectivity and data collection were resolved, Litmus Edge normalized and added context to the data that empowered Döhler to do more with their data at the industrial edge, before sending the data to Cloud for further processing. The normalized data achieved a 90% data compression rate on the edge, leading to significant cloud cost savings. The data that is sent to the cloud is already enriched with context that helped several business essential applications. Litmus Edge also helped Döhler implement data consistency across their plants for reliable OEE calculations.

“OEE is a key KPI for the Döhler supply chain team, which is why a globally uniform, standardized, and uninfluenceable calculation is required. Our application calculates the OEE in the cloud in real time based on the Litmus Edge data, analyzes the reasons for the loss, and makes it available to the Döhler team.”

Leading AI-based Industry 4.0 automations company

The built-in integrations from Litmus Edge also provides Döhler with a cost-effective method to send data to their Microsoft Azure cloud instance for Big Data Analytics and cold storage.

Optimized energy consumption

But that is not all. In line with Döhler’s innovative spirit, the company also leveraged the common data and digital infrastructure to drive a data-driven dynamic energy monitoring strategy. Litmus Edge provides anomaly detection and data models that help Döhler identify potential areas of energy cost reduction and optimize their production lines accordingly.

“After having used Litmus for just a couple of days, our experts at the plant were already able to identify and subsequently realize incremental energy savings.”

Jan Krall, Head of Digital Transformation