HelloFresh adopting the Industry 4.0 Revolution

There have been a number of industry revolutions that have shaped the way society consumes goods. High quality items are now mass produced. Not long ago it was unfathomable for everyone to have access to a watch. In the present day, TVs, cars, computers, phones, are mass produced at such great qualities and low costs that the majority of people have these goods or could if they wanted. Manufacturing of food in the form of meal-kits or ready-to-eat meals are now commonly available goods, providing a healthy, sustainable, high quality meal to people who wish to focus on something else rather than cooking and grocery shopping. The next evolution in manufacturing is being able to scale on demand when needed, and also to quickly adapt to consumer demands. The next evolution in manufacturing is integrating manufacturing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems into manufacturing plants to provide much greater flexibility of goods being produced, to eventually provide mass produced individually customised goods. This is the era of the Industry 4.0 Revolution.

What is the Industry 4.0 Revolution

There have been four distinct industry revolutions that have shaped manufacturing. With each revolution there has been a considerable increase in manufacturing capabilities, scalability, and a level of adaptability to consumer demands.

Industry Revolution 1.0

The first revolution, also known as ‘the industrial revolution’ refers to a period where manufacturing began being powered by steam and water instead of hand or horsepower. This period went from 1750 to around the 1830s[1]. The first concepts of rudimentary production lines began. Raw inputs to goods could be sourced further afield.

Industry Revolution 2.0

The second industry revolution came about with widespread use of electricity in manufacturing. This revolution is also known as the technical revolution due to the amount of technology that was introduced to manufacturing from transportation with railroads to communications with the telegraph. [2] The electrification meant complex machines could be developed, modern production lines could be implemented, raw materials could be reliably sourced from great distances.

Industry Revolution 3.0

The third industry revolution, also known as the Digital Revolution came about with the advent of the computer. The third revolution started with basic computer controlled machines all the way to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) [3] controlled machines seen in modern factories of today. The limiting factor with the third revolution is each machine was isolated from the production business process. [4] Although on demand scalability is possible, flexibility to quickly adapt to customer demands is still limited. Machines have to be re-programmed by experts and there is a long lead time to go through quality assurance before the machines are capable of adapting to consumer demand.

Industry Revolution 4.0

The fourth revolution is the merging of computer controlled machines with the business manufacturing ERP systems. [5] This merging of machine and business process systems allows Planning Teams to directly adjust manufacturing without the need of engineers to make adjustments to machines. It allows for manufacturing to adjust instantly as consumer demands begin to change. The fourth revolution will see goods quickly adapting to market preference changes to eventually producing more individually customised goods. At the same time bringing the costs of adaptive manufacturing down.

Diagram: Summary of the four industrial revolutions

Adoption at HelloFresh

The HelloFresh Youfoodz operations have taken their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, colloquially known as MFG (Manufacturing system) and integrated manufacturing equipment into the process. The MFG suite of systems allocates, manages, and tracks manufacturing processes from end to end. The MFG system manages all jobs performed by operations in the form of Kanbans for each of the manufacturing processes and creates job cards for each step in the process. The MFG system starts with loading daily targets and then works backwards to create jobs, and allocate raw ingredients. A new state of the art facility was built in early 2023 which saw the introduction of SCADA controlled machines, SCADA controlled Plant & Equipment, and SCADA integrated Building Management systems. MFG was enhanced to include the new machines into processes. Rather than simply leaving the machine processes as black boxes, MFG was enhanced to interact with the machines. This has meant the business planning teams can quickly adapt to consumer preferences, without the need to go through lengthy processes of changing machine configurations and retraining staff.

Diagram: MFG Kanban screen showing jobs allocated to different processes

Diagram: Job steps going through the automated kettle machine

Diagram: Example SCADA control screen that MFG sends jobs to to assist the machine operators

ScreeDiagram: Status of each component’s process going into a meal

Adding machine processes was a natural evolutionary step. In the past, a factory worker would go to the MFG ERP system to find what their next task was. They would then look at a printed job card or click on the PDF in MFG to see how they needed to execute the task. The factory worker would then follow all the manual steps and go back to MFG to weigh in their output and to mark the job as complete. With the introduction of machines in the process, the factory worker still has to accept new jobs, however, a lot of the manual tasks have been removed. MFG now sets the machine with the job details, and receives weighing output measures automatically. The factory worker’s role has changed from manually performing laborious tasks to now making sure the process is running smoothly and feeding the machines.

The diagram below shows an overview of the Youfoodz factory. The MFG application has direct access to machines through the SCADA system. At Youfoodz, Ignition by Inductive Automations was used as the SCADA platform. There are a few important notes about the architecture:

1. MFG does not have direct machine access, instead all communications go through the SCADA framework. This prevents the accidental overriding of machine safety measures controlled within SCADA. Only a subset of identified controls are permitted. Access to all the sensory and output data is available. The output data is used in analysis to ensure optimal consistent and high quality meals are produced with every batch.
2. All three factory core systems, Manufacturing Machines; Plant Boilers & Refreige & Compressors; and Building Management systems are all directly controlled by the same SCADA solution, or are integrated into the SCADA solution. This pattern establishes an architecture that can enable any type of future business requirements. It also reduces the costs of supporting the factory.
3. Although not essential, almost all compute is performed in the cloud. The main driver is the speed to implement and the reduced cost of having a complex on-premise server environment. At first there were numerous conversations about the merits of cloud compute vs on-premises for supporting manufacturing. However, Youfoodz adopted a diverse redundancy model with diverse internet providers as well as diverse internet paths through those providers. On top of the internet diversification as an extreme redundancy measure, the local Gateway can be quickly converted to be the primary SCADA controller to provide fallback manual control while all Internet links are repaired.
4. Because of the centralised architecture, the Production Managers’ tablet, depending on the level of permission, can perform tasks just as easily on-site or off-site, such as control machines, configure new types of production runs, through to checking on the plant and equipment. This has meant there is a reduced need for engineering and management to only be on-site to perform tasks.

Diagram: Overview of Youfoodz factory and integration with ERP

Benefits

The benefits so far have been:

1. Efficiency improvements in implementing new product range runs and the cost of introducing new product runs has decreased.
2. Quality and consistency of product runs has increased.
3. Traceability has increased immensely. Critical Control Point (CCP) traceability is able to occur at any point in the manufacturing process going back to the supplier batch and all the way forward to the customer.
4. The costs to run the plant has come down while the capability to scale has increased.

Future

The journey of Industry 4.0 is just beginning for HelloFresh and Youfoodz. Future projects include applying Machine Learning to SCADA historic data, Process tracking data from MFG, and Critical Control Point (CCP) data, to predict and identify Critical Control Point breaches well before batches are ruined and still able to be saved. An example is with the Kettles where the solution will identify jobs where the sequence of loading raw produce is critical to the outcome and immediately alert the Quality Control team where a batch looks like an issue may occur down the line. The identification of issues is different for each batch and is especially difficult for new production run batches. In these cases, Machine Learning will take learnings from previous batch patterns to predict where issues could occur for new batches that the workers are not familiar with.

References

1. “Industrial History of European Countries”. European Route of Industrial Heritage. Council of Europe. Retrieved 2 June 2021.
2. “History of Electricity”.
3. “What is SCADA” Inductive Automation. Posted 12th September 2018
4. “A brief History of Industry”. BOSCH. https://web.archive.org/web/20210126014912/https://www.sanayidegelecek.com/en/sanayi-4-0/tarihsel-gelisim/
5. “How Does ERP Help in Manufacturing” . ATS