The OPC Foundation welcomed Procter & Gamble (P&G) as its 900th member. A consumer goods company, P&G is invested in the smart manufacturing domain through its efforts to drive innovation by using digital technologies, including OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), in a concept it calls “constructive disruption.” P&G’s manufacturing operations have been recognized for delivering high performance and capability made possible by leveraging an operational excellence program called Integrated Work System (IWS). Based on this, IWS is leveraged across more than 100 P&G manufacturing sites globally, as well as more than 450 non-compete manufacturing operations. P&G is taking this to the next level by bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to its processing equipment in ways that continue to advance its heritage of operational excellence across the smart manufacturing spectrum. P&G is shaping its future by leveraging open standards in the industrial ecosystem in order to deploy its technologies at scale. OPC UA is an integral part of the industrial communication framework within P&G’s automation systems, providing secure connectivity from sensor to cloud.
Jeff Kent, vice president, smart platforms technology & innovation, P&G, stated: “It is critically important to P&G to have an innovation and operational ecosystem that can enable the speed-to-value-creation and sustained operational excellence expected from smart manufacturing. We see the need to work collaboratively with automation industry partners and The OPC Foundation, as a leading global open communications and integration standards body, to drive scalable, repeatable and resilient intelligent operational technology implementations across our worldwide operations. Smart manufacturing technology architectures, IT/OT network communications, data engineering and data modeling, S/W applications and AI/ML algorithms all depend on the proven, progressive and practical adoption of the specifications that we are adopting with our industry partners.”
Michael Clark, director OPC Foundation North America, said: “Procter & Gamble has successfully completed many phases of innovation ever since its inception almost two centuries ago; and today is no exception. Procter & Gamble continues to show its leadership by embracing the global standard of OPC UA, and we could not be more pleased to welcome them as the 900th member of the OPC Foundation – joining our collaborative digital communication ecosystem, comprised of the most forward-thinking companies on the planet.”
Stefan Hoppe, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, welcomed P&G as an official member. "It is with great pleasure that I welcome a very special company with tremendous global relevance, with high visibility in all of our daily lives. Procter & Gamble is the producer behind an incredible number of name-brand products we likely know and use. It fills us with pride to recognize how Procter & Gamble is committed to acquiring and leveraging critical data from a variety of automation assets, with the consistent adoption of OPC UA enabled products across its diverse manufacturing facilities."
