3 Cost-Saving Production Strategies for CPG

For food and beverage, household and personal care, and other Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers, market volatility over the past several years has necessitated strategic shifts.

As companies navigated their way out of the pandemic economy, they prioritized capacity before other KPIs to stay ahead of surging demand. Now, supply chains have caught up to demand, and CPG manufacturers are reprioritizing to address the full impacts of inflation. High prices have left consumers reeling — and demand has decreased. As a result, manufacturers are looking to drive revenue gains by optimizing unit volume instead of raising prices. It’s a critical time for CPG leadership to lower cost per unit manufactured and make near-term revenue gains.

In this dynamic, achievable near-term cost savings strategies are invaluable. Driving near-term cost savings is important to motivate CPG leadership to invest in new, innovative solutions. And as companies decrease overfills and scale back overhead prices, they can reduce prices for consumers — in turn boosting sales and driving brand loyalty.

Interested in pathways to near-term cost savings? Here are three agile strategies that feature cost-saving, data-driven solutions.

1. Reduce utility spend with FactoryTalk Energy Manager

Sustainability is becoming increasingly central to many organizations’ business priorities, and a data-driven sustainability strategy can uncover cost savings opportunities. With a software as a service (SaaS) solution that connects to an existing system, you can implement a sustainability framework on an accelerated timeline of one to two months. This framework provides insight into usage and spending on WAGES — water, air, gas, electricity, and steam. It also leverages analytic usage patterns to identify outlying areas for root cause analysis and correction.

The strategy in action: Implement an energy management solution that’s built on an industrial DataOps platform, like FactoryTalk® Energy Manager. This platform enables access to relevant and contextualized data and will highlight areas for operational improvement. Once the system identifies persistent outliers compared to a baseline, the process or asset — like boilers or freezers — can be optimized through closed loop-control with MPC or AI technologies.

Closed-loop solutions manage and optimize the outlying assets in the energy management application, where additional actions can be taken to refine performance. These granular changes have a significant impact on your overall energy consumption, helping you to reduce spending across energy vectors. With FactoryTalk Energy Manager, manufacturers can reduce their utility spending by 5% to 30%.

2. Achieve product giveaway reduction with Perfect Fill

Fill variation is a familiar headache for many CPG manufacturers. Persistent overfilling can result in product giveaway and lost revenue, while underfilling leads to costly rework and regulatory risk. Achieving filling consistency is critical to help protect plant profitability. A digital solution that targets fill variation can help you lessen chronic over- and -underfilling and more tightly control your production fill rate and volume across packaging lines.

The strategy in action: Employ an AI-driven filling solution, like LogixAI® for Perfect Fill, that senses and predicts variables on your filling lines to reduce chronic fill variation. This soft sensor solution can be combined with the PlantPAx® distributed control system, and FactoryTalk® Optix™, a Human Machine Interface visualization system. These technologies analyze historical and real-time streaming data and build a self-learning AI model. When deployed at the edge, the model predicts the product fill weight of each package.

These real-time predictions alert operators of filling anomalies. Alternatively, you can enable autonomous closed-loop control to adjust control setpoints and minimize error. This model is easily scalable and pairs with edge management solutions for use across additional fillers and facilities. With this AI-driven solution, you can achieve greater than 50% product giveaway reduction, lessening the need for costly rework and driving near-term cost savings.

3. Decrease troubleshooting time with operational copilots

The way organizations interact with data is evolving. Across CPG and other industries, manufacturers are harnessing advanced cloud and AI solutions to access dynamic data insights, streamline operations, and optimize production. This transformation replaces previous strategies with AI copilots to build applications and design user experience. With the help of an operational copilot, you can reduce troubleshooting time down to minutes and automatically analyze equipment alarms on packaging line equipment. Copilots can go even further to perform ad-hoc analysis and recommend resolution procedures.

The strategy in action: Enhance human decision-making and reduce troubleshooting time with AI copilots. This technology can provide real-time guidance, analysis, and documentation to help you correct inefficiencies and reach resolutions faster. Plus, you can integrate industrial DataOps platforms with solutions like Microsoft Azure to harness and customize industry-specific data models. This integration uses the Azure AI suite as the basis for co-pilot development, enabling translations between natural languages and data.

Embrace innovative manufacturing solutions

Data-driven strategies will enable you to increase operational efficiency and uncover clearly defined pathways toward cost savings. In turn, these wins result in more competitive pricing for consumers and drive brand loyalty. As you implement new frameworks for cost effectiveness, prioritize manufacturing solutions that increase the breadth and depth of data in your system. These solutions will support ongoing digital transformation and production optimization across the organization.