Real-time data to link farmer suppliers, milk transport and storage, and processing facilities.
Australian food company, Bega Cheese will be using Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT solution launch an IoT service linking the company’s farmer suppliers, milk transport and storage, and processing facilities.
Adel Salman general manager supply chain at Bega Cheese told CIO Tech Asia, the IoT solutions will provide real time data on milk production at farmer suppliers including volumes, temperature, quality composition, and transport conditions, to gain efficiencies in pickup and delivery frequency to reduce costs and improve traceability.
“The real-time data and insights from the IoT deployment will allow us to enhance our supply chain productivity and competitiveness with just-in-time milk pickup and processing requirements on a large scale,” he said. “This will ultimately allow us to increase our growth across higher-value premium products in the future.”
According to Salman IoT will also enable the diversified food company to increase its supply chain sustainability by “reducing milk wastage and fuel consumption of milk transport partners”.
Although the company knew IoT could be an “excellent solution”, especially with the use of real-time data for both inbound and outbound activities in the company’s supply chain, it didn’t have the experience needed to “set-up” IoT projects.
“We started looking around for a partner that could provide us with IoT expertise, resources, industry contacts and help with government backing,” said Salman. “Swinburne University of Technology with its Internet of Things Lab and Industry 4.0 initiatives as well as its research partnership with Software AG was the perfect collaborator for us.
Salman said Swinburne University listened to what Bega needed to achieve and together with Software AG, developed an IoT strategy with a set of solutions that met our needs.
“The university has also been instrumental in helping us to successfully apply for a research grant from the federal government’s Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P),” Salman said. Its research partnership with Software AG was the perfect collaborator for us.”
The scope of the project will include:
- A novel low-cost milk quality sensor enabled for IoT
- An IoT ‘live‘ Supply Chain Monitoring system for continuous real-time monitoring of milk supply quantity and quality, farm conditions (i.e. humidity and temperature) affecting milk production, and milk pickup events across the supply chain
- A Dynamic Pickup Scheduling and Monitoring tool that utilises sensor data reporting milk supply change events to automatically maintain optimal pickup schedules, and pickup events to monitor schedule and process adherence
- A predictive machine learning based Highly Accurate Forecasting tool for milk quality and quantity that exploits live and long-term historical data from sensors across the supply chain
- A Farmer App that provides milk forecasting together with milk quality and pickup alerts
Swinburne University will also develop and build unique IoT sensors specifically for Bega Cheese.
Tags: Bega CheeseIoTSoftware AGsupply chainSwinburne University
