Hey Siri…

Are you ready for the revolution? No, this isn’t some University Professor’s political opinion piece, it’s a question about the state of your business. At home you might be getting comfortable using your iPhone to track your daily exercise, or asking Alexa to dim the living room lights, but what happens when you get to your dairy facility? Some of you might be nodding knowingly and others suspiciously.

Many are calling this change Industry 4.0; it represents the culmination of interconnected yet dispersed computing technologies to make manufacturing smart. What does that mean? It means using arrays of linked sensors around the plant – ones that monitor key parameters like temperature, phage levels, or conductivity – to optimize your processing conditions to increase yields or dynamically manage inventory ordering for packaging and ingredients. It means analyzing the composition of the milk while it’s being collected at the farms and comparing it against the formulations of incoming product orders from your customers to decide the most efficient order and volumes of production. It means leveraging AI to systematically adjust sanitation parameters to learn how to improve the effectiveness of your environmental cleaning program. It is the buzz words of Internet of Things (IotT), Machine Learning, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Computing, Blockchain, Smart Sensors, Augmented Reality (AR) to list a few. These are of course big promises, and the devil is in the implementation. My lab is only four years old, and we have five computer systems for different analytical equipment, and it’s not always easy linking the data from them together. The challenge of meaningful connecting quality, production, and ordering systems in a facility that has added them piecemeal over 40 years is even bigger. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, there are new businesses popping up every day to help you successfully make the change.

This new industrial revolution will change the dairy industry and how it is run. In fact, it already is, and so to those of you curiously nodding, I encourage you to start with a google search. If you’d like to know more, email us. If many of you feel there’s a need for a deeper dive with experts from the front lines of the revolution in dairy, let us know, and we can work on putting together a more formal seminar on Industry 4.0. Email me at alcaine@cornell.edu 

Hey Siri, set our appointment…