Siemens, a global technology company, has launched an application suite for the Middle East’s expanding food and beverage manufacturing sector, focusing on digitalising brownfield operations with a minimum of investment to support industrialisation of regional economies.

Shown for the first time globally at Dubai’s Gulfood Manufacturing 2019, the SIMATIC WinCC Open Architecture, on which the underlying SCADA system suite is based, allows manufacturers to create transparency and gain insights into existing production processes and operations by collecting, analysing and visualising data to address specific operational challenges, said a statement.

The suite strengthens Siemens’ portfolio of technology for digital industry, showcased at Gulfood Manufacturing 2019, which demonstrates how industrial enterprises of all sizes in the Middle East could embrace the digital transformation to accommodate rapidly changing consumer demands.

Siemens will show how regional manufacturers can use technologies from the Digital Enterprise portfolio to achieve consistently higher levels of product quality, plant availability, resource efficiency and flexibility, increasing competitiveness in a global marketplace.

Athar Siddiqui, executive vice president, Factory Automation and Motion Controls, Siemens Middle East, said: “Our new IOT suite strengthens our offering to the region’s food and beverage sector, and marks a great step forward for smart, digitalised manufacturing in the Middle East.”

“As industrialisation gathers pace in the region, manufacturers must be able to innovate swiftly to disrupt existing processes, create new business models and adapt to changing consumer demands. The key to this is embracing the digital enterprise,” Siddiqui added.

The SIMATIC WinCC OA IOT (Informational & Operational Technology convergency) suite can be installed without disrupting the production process and combines industrial-grade hardware, software and intuitive applications to enable data capture and pre-processing at the machine-level in real time.

The suite’s customised dashboard gives facility operators the ability to visualise processes, production flows, machines and even entire plants to assess and improve performance, and it can be scaled up by connecting to MindSphere, Siemens’ cloud-based operating system for the Internet of Things.

It also includes a series of applications for data visualisation, data processing and analytics, connectivity and alerts, all of which can be used without specialised knowledge or training. Users can develop their own apps to add new digital functions to their automation system, and it can be operated by the end user without the need for an integrator.

Developing a digital twin of performance for a machine, line or a whole plant enables manufacturers to respond to rapidly changing market demands at every stage, utilising data and end-to-end automation from the product idea to the manufacturing, filling, packaging and labelling.

It also makes it possible to test out planned changes to the plant and the effect they will have on production capacity. This allows both manufacturing and process industries, including food and beverage, to boost the speed of innovation and productivity, and enables customised, individual products to be mass produced.

The Middle East’s manufacturing sector is expanding as countries seek to develop increasingly diversified economies. The UAE, for example, is seeking to increase the contribution of the manufacturing sector to overall GDP from 11 per cent to 25 per cent by 2025, it stated.