Fast and individualised

Digitalisation in the beverage industry

“In bottling and canning facilities, people used to say: either fast or individualised. Thanks to digitalisation, these two aspirations are converging quite closely – all the way down to Batch Size 1. This opens up entirely new approaches for marketing beverages,” said Volker Kronseder at the business press conference held on 11 September at the drinktec 2017.

The Chairman of the VDMA’s Beverage Machinery and Dairy Technology Association, who is simultaneously Chairman of the drinktec’s Advisory Council, emphasised that the industrial sector has been addressing the complex issue of digitalisation ever since the 1990s. This will transform the industrial sector, society as a whole, and politics alike.

Keywords here include Industry 4.0, the internet of things or big data. For bottling and canning plants, easily manageable, dependable systems are being developed, said Volker Kronseder, designed to facilitate a consistently coherent flow of information from machines and processes to the humans involved. The aim is to enable complex production sequences to organise and optimise themselves, and at the same time enable relevant external data to be integrated.

There are plenty of pertinent examples at the drinktec, not least on Krones’ stand in Hall B6:

So now how can companies in the beverage industry utilise digitalisation in their existing machines and lines as well? Are there solutions for networking the production operation in its entirety, and thus obtaining detailed analyses of the process concerned? And how can the production operation as a whole be optimised in this way? These are questions that clients want the answers to. And our specialists at Krones will provide the succinct answers they need.