The OPC Foundation is proud to welcome Procter & Gamble as the 900th OPC Foundation member. A leading consumer goods company, P&G is also a global leader in the Smart Manufacturing domain through its efforts to drive innovation by using digital technologies, including OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), in a concept they call “constructive disruption.” Procter & Gamble’s Manufacturing Operations have been recognized in delivering industry leading performance and capability over many years made possible by leveraging their operational excellence program called Integrated Work System (IWS). Based on this success, IWS is not only leveraged across their 100+ manufacturing sites globally, but now also 450+ non-compete manufacturing operations are leveraging IWS to deliver superior results. Procter & Gamble is taking this to the next level by bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to their processing equipment in ways that continue to advance their heritage of operational excellence across the smart manufacturing spectrum. P&G is shaping its future by leveraging open standards in the industrial ecosystem in order to deploy their technologies at scale. OPC UA is an integral part of the industrial communication framework within P&G’s automation systems, providing secure connectivity from sensor to cloud.
Open standards drive resilient and intelligent OT
When asked about P&G’s efforts to harmonize their digital transformation while advancing their heritage of operational excellence, Jeff Kent, Vice President, Smart Platforms Technology & Innovation, P&G, stated: “It is critically important to P&G to have an innovation and operational ecosystem that can enable the speed-to-value-creation and sustained operational excellence expected from smart manufacturing. We see the need to work collaboratively with automation industry partners and The OPC Foundation, as a leading global open communications and integration standards body, to drive scalable, repeatable and resilient intelligent operational technology implementations across our worldwide operations. Smart manufacturing technology architectures, IT/OT network communications, data engineering and data modeling, S/W applications and AI/ML algorithms all depend on the proven, progressive and practical adoption of the specifications that we are adopting with our industry partners.”
Michael Clark, Director OPC Foundation North America was honored to make this milestone announcement, saying, “Procter & Gamble has successfully completed many phases of innovation ever since its inception almost two centuries ago; and today is no exception.” Clark further stated, “Procter & Gamble continues to show its leadership by embracing the global standard of OPC UA, and we could not be more pleased to welcome them as the 900th member of the OPC Foundation – joining our collaborative digital communication ecosystem, comprised of the most forward-thinking companies on the planet.”
Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation, welcomed P&G as an official member. "It is with great pleasure that I welcome a very special company with tremendous global relevance, with high visibility in all of our daily lives." Hoppe explained, "Procter & Gamble is the producer behind an incredible number of name-brand products we likely know and use. It fills us with pride to recognize how Procter & Gamble is committed to acquiring and leveraging critical data from a variety of automation assets, with the consistent adoption of OPC UA enabled products across its diverse manufacturing facilities."
