The OPC Foundation is proud to welcome Procter & Gamble as the 900th OPC Foundation member. A leading consumer goods company, P&G; is also a global leader in the smart manufacturing domain through its efforts to drive innovation by using digital technologies, including OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), in a concept called ‘constructive disruption’. Procter & Gamble’s manufacturing operations have been recognised in delivering industry-leading performance and capability over many years, made possible by leveraging the company’s operational excellence programme called Integrated Work System (IWS). Based on this success, IWS is not only leveraged across its 100+ manufacturing sites globally, but now also 450+ non-manufacturing operations are leveraging IWS to deliver superior results. Procter & Gamble 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.
When asked about P&G’s efforts to harmonise its digital transformation, while advancing its heritage of operational excellence, P&G; vice president of Smart Platforms Technology & Innovation, Jeff Kent, 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 modelling, 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 of the OPC Foundation North America was honoured to make this milestone announcement, saying: “Procter & Gamble has successfully completed many phases of innovation ever since its inception almost two centuries ago, and today is no exception.” Clark further stated: “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, which is 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, and with high visibility in all of our daily lives.” Hoppe explained, “Procter & Gamble is the producer behind an incredible number of name-brand products we likely know and use. It fills us with pride to recognise 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.”
Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation’s mission is to help industry vendors, end users, and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation provides the best specifications, technology, process, and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable, interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation serves 900 members worldwide in the industrial automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industry 4.0, building automation, machine tools, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and smart energy sectors.
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