Arla Foods transcends distance to feed a hungry world with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2

Arla Foods feeds people all over the world. Arla is a European dairy cooperative headquartered in Denmark and owned by dairy farmers in seven European countries. It produces high-quality milk products, including cheeses, yogurts, butters, and spreads sold under brands that include Arla®, Castello®, Lurpak®, and Puck®. With 60 production sites around the world producing a highly perishable product, Arla simply can’t afford downtime. Its innovative use of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on Microsoft HoloLens 2 didn’t just save the day when employees had to step into high-skill positions to meet suddenly increased production goals and fill in for exposed employees—it helped create a forward-thinking blueprint for accelerating Arla’s goals for agility and paved the way for significant productivity boosts.

Preserving a traditional industry with information technology

The Arla IT team assists the European dairy cooperative’s widely dispersed administrative employees by supporting Arla’s line-of-business applications. In late 2019, the IT team began to research mixed reality technology as the solution to several disparate use cases. “We were intrigued by mixed reality technologies as a way to support remote collaboration,” says Steffen Lundgaard Jorgensen, Senior Production Digitalization Manager at Arla Foods. “Given our commitment to workforce flexibility and optimizing productivity, that seemed like an excellent alternative to much of the travel our people were doing. Little did we know that the technology would help us handle the challenge that was coming our way.” 

As one of the largest handful of dairy companies on the planet, Arla takes a holistic view of its vital role in the global food chain. “Sustainability dominates our company,” says Corneliu Ionut Preotu, IT Security Assessor at Arla Foods. “Every person is doing their part to support our climate initiatives.” For Preotu, that means taking a hard look at travel. Until 2020, visiting Arla production sites around the world was part of his regular routine. However, his goal was to dramatically reduce his carbon footprint from these site visits. 

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist was an alluring possibility for employees like Preotu and for a company that needs to have remote experts supporting its globally distributed production sites. Employees can use any iOS or Android device at hand, from a cellular device to a laptop, to show the equipment or the factory floor to a remote expert in real time. These remote experts can even add 3D annotations right in the context of the onsite employees’ real-world environment. Employees can also use Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2 for a hands-free experience if they need both hands free to conduct repairs. 

Rising to a sudden challenge

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arla Foods acted quickly to both protect its employees and its production. Arla immediately rolled out proactive infection-control standards to keep employees safe. Very few of its skilled operators had been exposed to the virus, but the company was taking no chances. That meant mandatory quarantine for anyone who might have been exposed and an immediate ban on external visits. At the same time, production needed to ramp up. Extra employees could be found to help at short notice, but they didn’t have the technical skills or training needed to perform the job. 

That’s when Jorgensen and the digital team thought of his mixed reality research, and he put in an urgent call to his local Microsoft account manager. “We had to protect our people while safely ensuring a stable food supply,” he says. “We needed to find a way for our expert operators to remotely guide our substitute employees through the procedures they needed to know to get the job done. It was an emergency.”

While this situation required an immediate response, it also put pressure on Arla management to think ahead of the crisis in the moment and activate its robust crisis management and business continuity plan to ensure a stable food supply in the event of other global and macroeconomic changes in future. How the workforce and supply chains might be affected in the months ahead was anyone’s guess, which only served to reinforce the importance of business continuity plans. The highly perishable nature of dairy products further added to the urgency.

Bridging continents with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and HoloLens

The Arla Foods IT and supply chain teams worked with their Microsoft account team to deploy Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to the factory floor in just two weeks. “We decided that the best way to roll out the technology quickly was to capitalize on the infrastructure already there, which was our cellular devices and tablets,” explains Jorgensen. “It was a fast, simple approach that worked well. Then we began to add sophistication, bringing in 15 HoloLens 2 devices for even better hands-free collaboration and for more complex situations.” 

This strategic transformation, embracing innovation via mixed reality, helps the company respond to breakdowns of critical equipment with greater agility because experts are on hand to lend assistance right away—no travel time necessary. “Because we produce a perishable product, our employees need to keep the raw milk moving,” says Preotu. “So when a machine goes down, they may have only a 30-minute window to get things up and running again. But these machines don’t respect our suppliers’ service windows.” 

The success of the operation holds implications for future maintenance procedures. The idea of using the company’s new capabilities to build knowledge fascinates Jorgensen. “We look forward to recording fixes for various problems with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, creating an online repair library that employees, new hires, interns, and students can use to solve problems effectively,” he says. “We’d like to use Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and HoloLens to record best practices and build company knowledge. That’s a very exciting possibility.” 

According to Rasmus Hagen Frederiksen, Senior Strategy and Design Consultant at Arla Foods, that productivity boost can extend to external equipment suppliers, and access to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist technology is ubiquitous. “Several companies supply hardware that works with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist,” he says. “They don’t have to use the same hardware with it that we do. We prize Microsoft technology because it’s so flexible.” 

Reimagining the future

Ideas for lifting collaboration and productivity and building sustainability are growing. “We look at Dynamics 365 Remote Assist as a remote collaboration platform,” says Jorgensen. “Our strategy is to have a simple way to connect our employees and every external partner, whether it’s a multinational equipment manufacturer or the local blacksmith.”

The factory tours that normally cost Preotu more than a month of travel every year were so effective with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist that he will continue with the model, and many more improvements are taking shape. “We will follow up the successes we’ve had with management factory tours with further use cases,” says Preotu. “We’re inspired by the possibilities of working with suppliers, machine maintenance employees, and various internal and external machine audit programs.” 

He lauds the all-around value of the solution. “Using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and HoloLens 2 means less impact on the planet, reduced travel costs, and more time with our families,” Preotu concludes. “It’s win-win-win.” 

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