The new ‘Tetra Pak Factory OS’ is designed to work with whatever size factory and whatever existing legacy tools you’re currently using, with the flexibility to expand with your business as it grows.
At the heart of this offering is a new data integration platform, powered by open technologies, analytics and industry standards. It connects equipment and systems throughout a factory (or factories), transforming fragmented data into one unified, real-time view.
Automation: Impactful yet out of reach
A recent comparative study from Tetra Pak shows that highly automated beverage factories achieve:
- 20% higher overall equipment effectiveness
- 45% lower product waste,
- 20% fewer packaging line stops compared to less automated facilities
Yet, despite the benefits, many factories are still struggling to adopt automation due to limited digital expertise and cost restraints.
Tetra Pak Factory OS is designed to bridge this gap by combining advanced technologies with deep food and beverage know-how, and giving users incredible flexibility by offering standardised data collection across all equipment - regardless of age or supplier.
The technology also allows producers to adopt automation and digitalisation at their own pace. So whilst the Factory OS can be used as a full end-to-end system with everything connected, it can also be shrunk down for very specific projects.
When we built the Factory OS ecosystem, one of the guiding principles at the start was to make it scalable.
Sean Sims, vice president, automation & solutions at Tetra Pak
This scalability means the technology can work for smaller and bigger manufacturers alike and allows them to take a more phased approach to their investment if needed.
The technology is enabled by precise equipment and production data models. This means it’s able to provide more focused insights – what Sean Sims, vice president, automation & solutions at Tetra Pak calls “contextualised data”.
This is important as it means manufacturers can gather more accurate, precise details that they can use to make more targeted decisions; and, if users wish in the future, to power better artificial intelligent ‘agents’ (think ChatGPT that knows a specific piece of machinery inside out).
“The more targeted you make your language models, the more granular they can be,” Sims said.
“If you’re pointing your prompt engine [AI agent] to a very specific set of operational manuals that is super structured, very contained, there’s not a lot of ambiguity in the data set,” he offered as way of example.
“If you use a standard off-the-shelf large language model, it’s been built to look at much bigger set of publicly available data. It’s the difference between [the AI reading] the manual for the [Tetra Pak] X1 filling machine and reading every manual that’s been ever written by Tetra Pak, and then making a decision. You’ve got more context, but the use case doesn’t really add any value.”
And the more you can shrink these language models down, the less compute power it needs, making it more efficient – i.e. less energy intensive, less expensive, and more sustainable.
Getting F&B producers AI ready
In very basic terms, the tech gives manufacturers the ability to collect the data they need, rather than a pulling together a vast and non-specific data lake – making not just their decisions more meaningful, but setting up their systems for a more capable AI-powered factory.
“Tetra Pak Factory OS ️is more than a technology portfolio – it embodies our vision for the future of food and beverage manufacturing,” added Charles Brand, executive vice president, processing solutions & equipment at Tetra Pak.
“Designed for the next decade and beyond, it enables producers to build the factory of the future, where resilience, efficiency and sustainability go hand in hand.”
The ecosystem was developed in collaboration with several partners, including Accenture, Siemens, Rockwell Automation, and Inductive Automation. This has given way to its unique flexibility and enabled Tetra Pak insight into each of these business’s roadmaps, meaning that the technology can hopefully keep pace with the fast-changing landscape of today’s digital world.