Henkel is WEF Global Lighthouse & Henkel Data Foundation is running on Azure
Artikel auf Deutsch
The international FMCG producer Henkel is worldwide leading innovations, brands, and technologies in three business areas: Adhesive Technologies, Beauty Care, and Laundry & Home Care. Henkel is using a cloud based data platform – the “Digital Backbone” – to connect locations, production facilities and distribution centers in real time. Using sensors and Internet-of-Things technology the production data is monitored, stored and analyzed for customer and end consumer demands with a focus on sustainability, process cost and inventory optimization.
Copyright: Henkel
Henkel is using sensors to detect, among others, energy and water consumption as well as machine telemetry data, which is extracted and aggregated. Next to analyzing KPIs, Henkel is also able to examine signals within ranges of seconds. The gathered data is made available to all relevant stakeholders using clearly structured dashboards to facilitate data-driven decision making. Based on this data analysis Henkel was able to reduce the energy consumption of its Laundry & Home Care division since rollout of the system by almost 20%.
For this reason, the World Economic Forum has added Henkel to its „Global Lighthouse Network“ – a community of currently 44 manufacturers, who from WEF’s point of view act as pioneer using technology to transform production, value chains and business models, to derive operational and financial benefits. Microsoft is also part of this community as technology provider.
WEF’s expert panel explicitly highlighted the standardized data acquisition and availability over all global locations in a “Digital Backbone”. The possibility to monitor and optimize the supply chain network holistically and rollout improvements efficiently in the complete network is seen as digital role model for the manufacturing industry.
The WEF community offers Henkel benefits such as straightforward exchanges with other partners, point of views for new technologies and easier access to sought after technology providers.
The data platform’s underlying technology is continuously being enhanced. The so called “Henkel Data Foundation” has been developed by Henkel-IT, is running in the Azure Cloud and is a scalable, highly integrated platform for data management, processing and analysis. The platform processes millions of data sets originating in the complete value chain and offers reporting as well as visualization tools.
You can find the article in German on LinkedIn and the contact to the author here.
