Danone
Industry 4.0 Case Study
Improving engagement with digital tools.
“The central benefit of facial recognition has been as an enabler for deploying digital tools in the business. Removing a key frustration for many users has improved engagement in these technologies dramatically.”
Key learnings
1. Streamlining Operations through Facial Recognition: Danone Aintree’s adoption
of facial recognition technology addresses the common challenge of password management across multiple digital applications. By implementing this solution, the Plant Management System (PMS) serves as a consistent front end for operators,
reducing frustration, enhancing efficiency, and ensuring timely and accurate completion of tasks.
2. Enhancing Engagement and Compliance: The facial recognition system not only improves user engagement with digital tools but also significantly contributes to compliance and audit requirements. This increased engagement results in routine data capture, leading to better audit scores and greater confidence in data analytics. The technology eliminates workarounds, ensuring reliable data and streamlined access to international markets.
3. Future Potential and Integration: Looking ahead, the facial recognition system has the potential to evolve into a comprehensive solution for Danone, serving as a single sign-in for all systems and applications. The envisioned expansion includes incorporating clocking in/out, access management, and other functionalities, ultimately simplifying employees’ digital experiences across the entire site. This forward-looking approach aims to enhance digital literacy, engagement, and overall operational efficiency for the benefit of the entire organisation.
Background
The Danone Aintree site manufactures a wide range of infant formula products, including those for high-care and high-needs clients.
Employing 300 people, this facility is a cornerstone of Danone’s commitment to quality and environmental responsibility.
Specialising in the production of globally exported baby formula, the Aintree site contributes significantly to Danone’s international standing.
As part of a global group employing 96,000 people, this case study explores how the Aintree site has tackled engagement with multiple digital tools through the adoption of facial recognition.
Opportunity
The Aintree site has dozens of digital applications designed to manage different tasks, from HR to production data capture. Operators may interact with some of these multiple times a day, and others monthly or less.
As is common across many organisations, remembering and managing passwords for cyber security was often a barrier to effective use of these tools.
This has cascaded to inconsistent use of the different applications, as people couldn’t access systems in a timely manner. Frustration was borne by operators and support functions as tasks couldn’t be completed in a timely and accurate fashion.
To tackle this, a Plant Management System (PMS) had been developed in-house to act as a consistent front-end experience for operators regarding shop-floor-specific activities. This PMS has become a central tool for digitising processes that were historically paper or Excel based, resolving audit findings and reducing manual input.
Specifically, waste reporting and raw material quality checks were two important activities that the PMS was able to adopt.
In addition, this system incorporated warning and alarm functions to warn operators when specific tasks were due or overdue with a built-in escalation hierarchy to prevent reaching out-of-spec conditions in production.
The importance of this system, alongside the many others that the Danone team are required to engage with still had the weak link of passwords being forgotten or entered incorrectly.
Whilst resets via support staff were available, the delay in resets could still impact production.
Solution
The Danone team decided to trial a facial recognition method of signing on to the PMS.
To do this they first obtained some legal guidance to ensure that all employees were aware that this is an opt-in service for their benefit, with images being used for this purpose and nothing else.
When opening the PMS solution, a facial recognition option is presented to the user, at which point they can simply look at the device camera (standard on all Danone devices) and be automatically logged in.
The system works by establishing a matrix of the user’s face and comparing it against a standard already captured in the database from when the solution was set up.
Testing to refine accuracy of the model resulted in a robust solution that could still work with slight changes for users, such as wearing masks or glasses.
With any significant changes, such as tattoos, a new reference image can be supplied to ensure the solution keeps working seamlessly.
The solution combined best practice digital security with very simple useability, the perfect combination to ensure compliance and audit requirements are met, whilst reducing frustration and admin for operators.
Benefits
The central benefit of facial recognition has been as an enabler for deploying digital tools in the business. Removing a key frustration for many users has improved engagement in these technologies dramatically.
This engagement then compounds to mean that systems are more frequently utilised and therefore compliance data is captured more routinely, leading to better audit scores and therefore more reliable access to lucrative markets overseas.
Greater confidence and access to digital formats of data have also resulted in confidence in data collection and therefore the viability of data analytics on performance.
Importantly, workarounds or shortcuts are now no longer possible, but with the added reassurance that users are very unlikely to need them with the robust and simple nature of the system.
Future
Ultimately, a single front-end for all applications accessed via facial recognition could be a really powerful solution on which Danone can build its employees’ digital literacy and engagement – Incorporating clocking in and out, access management and other functions would simplify the employee experience across the site.
Going forward, the solution can be expanded to ultimately become a single sign-in for all systems required to be accessed, with the PMS acting as a front-end of every application required by Danone employees, subscribing and publishing information from a standardised front-end that users are familiar with.
In terms of useability, the team have discussed combining this with site access management, training records, automated data capture on operator inputs and others. All these are to be explored and discussed with teams to understand the possible return on investment.
Furthermore, a new reference image of a user’s face could be populated every time they use the system, keeping it consistently accurate.
About the site visits and Industry 4.0
The purpose of the Demonstration Network is to drive uptake of Industry 4.0 technologies among New Zealand manufacturers with the aim of increasing their productivity and global competitiveness. The Network of Sit Visits (NSV) are part of the Industry 4.0 Demonstration Network, which also includes a mobile showcase and smart factory showing cutting-edge Industry 4.0 technologies in action. The NSV takes selected companies through a fully funded assessment process to help them accelerate their own journey towards Industry 4.0, and sees them share their knowledge with other manufacturers.
