Grupo Bimbo takes a bite out of production costs with Azure IoT throughout factories

Since its 1945 start as a bread bakery in Mexico City, Grupo Bimbo has expanded to 33 countries and more than 100 brands. Some of its more famous labels include Oroweat, Sara Lee, Entenmann’s, and of course, the Bimbo house brand symbolized by the lovable “Bimbo” cartoon bear.

Like anyone who turns out a nutritious loaf at home, Grupo Bimbo takes pride in its product, zealously safeguarding cleanliness and quality. The difference lies in scale. To turn out millions of loaves every day, the company depends on metrics that illustrate everything from machine speeds and temperatures to downtime. But like bread, analytics need to be fresh. Grupo Bimbo answered that need with an innovative program in its US-based facilities, Bimbo Bakeries USA. It rolled out Microsoft Azure IoT technology as the base for the GBConnected solution it created to gather information from its many machines and devices, turning out valuable analytics in real time. Everyone in the company, from executives to the associates lifting fresh loaves out of the oven, relies on data, giving the production of a very traditional food a wonderfully twenty-first century flavor.

Baking in corporate values

The little icon from Ethisphere at the bottom of the Grupo Bimbo homepage testifies to the kind of company the baker is: a five-time honoree as one of the world’s most ethical companies. “It’s part of our culture, our history,” asserts Antonio Parra, Vice President of Digital Transformation and Information at Grupo Bimbo. That translates into a business model based on respect, says Jorge Zarate, Vice President of Global Operations at Grupo Bimbo. “People are the most important consideration here,” he declares. “We respect our competitors, the countries where we operate and their laws, the societies we serve, and of course, our associates—the people who work in our factories. We depend on them all.”

Grupo Bimbo feels that living its values and profitability go hand in hand. The key to both aims lies in production data, delivered in the right time, at the right place, and in the right format. With a highly perishable product, manual data collection and reporting proved too slow and costly. The company needed a way to get the data at the source. “We’re gathering more information all the time,” says Ramon Rivera, Senior Vice President of Manufacturing and Supply Chain at Bimbo Bakeries USA. “We’re striving and gearing ourselves to become a data-driven company.”

That aspiration called for the right technology. Like any exacting baker, Grupo Bimbo chose its recipe for success carefully and selected Azure IoT solutions to support its GBConnected initiative.

Choosing the best-fit technology and the optimal relationship

Grupo Bimbo began its 18-month Internet of Things (IoT) journey with a series of pilot projects based on technologies from several different technology providers. Prepared with that strong experience base, the company responded to a Microsoft proposal with a solid requirements list. “After three or four years of testing prototypes, we understood what works in the real world,” says Ricardo Chavez-Ramirez, Director of Engineering Systems at Bimbo Bakeries USA. “Microsoft Azure had the flexibility and the agility we needed, and the business model Microsoft offers for using Azure fits our use cases and global business.”

The company embarked on a close relationship with Microsoft. As Zarate put it: “Microsoft knows all about AI, and we know all about bread. Learning together will make Grupo Bimbo stronger and better.”

Apart from ease and speed of deployment, Grupo Bimbo wanted a solution that would accommodate years of work in progress for related initiatives. For example, the company created a scheduling system for the bakery business that it uses for product specifications, formulations, recipes, equipment speeds, yields, and other critical data points. The fact that the solution comprises several non-Microsoft technologies, including an Oracle database, wasn’t an issue. “The great thing about Azure is its flexibility to blend in other systems and legacy software,” says Chavez-Ramirez. “We can combine data from our Oracle databases with Azure solutions and real-time telemetry. It’s an architecture that stresses configuration, not customization, which makes it easy to deploy and maintain.”

To ensure the best return on investment, the GBConnected team selected the equipment that, once outfitted with IoT devices, would add the most speed to production. “In a high-volume, low-margin business like ours, it’s all about speed,” says Chavez-Ramirez. He lists the reasons for downtime that cut into production: maintenance, sanitation, and product changes. “Keeping track of the speed of the line is one of the quickest wins for us,” he explains. “It’s fast and easy because basically 80 percent of the effort is in connecting equipment. That speaks to the strength of the Azure solution, which made that connection easy. We started using Azure Time Series Insights from day one.”

Connecting machines, data—and people

The Bimbo Bakeries USA team connected programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to bakery equipment—ovens, slicers, and other bakery mainstays. PLC data flows from the various devices on Grupo Bimbo factory lines to IoT Services. The data is orchestrated using Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime in Azure Data Factory for distribution to the appropriate next touchpoints in the system, and it’s consolidated in an Azure SQL Database. Data to be used for analytics converges in Azure Data Lake. “From day one, we can start tracking performance data from the PLCs and using time series inside of Azure IoT Services and create Power BI reports,” says Chavez-Ramirez. “And now that we have access to all of this data, we can use Azure Data Explorer to correlate quality and master production schedule data for a full picture of what’s going on in the factories.” Those Power BI reports are available on factory floors and on the devices (including mobile) that managers and executives use.

Keeping the focus on people

Grupo Bimbo is adamant about end point change management. “The magic the data gives us arises from the ability of our people to use it,” says Monica Josefina Ambriz Robledo, Director of Digital Transformation at Grupo Bimbo. “Our Continuous Improvement team is working on change management because no matter what level people are in the organization, they need to know how to read, interpret, and make decisions with data. The approachability of Azure technologies helps make that easier.”

Data that flows in from the PLCs crystallizes in the company’s Overall Equipment Excellence (OEE) dashboards, a unified data display that Grupo Bimbo projects via screens to associates on the production line.

The OEE dashboard projected to the local production line

In the space of 18 months, Bimbo Bakeries USA took all of its bakeries in the United States live with GBConnected. Executives now have a clear view into what’s happening on the line at any of those bakeries, even from another country. “With our real-time data, I can get a sense of what’s going on with one of our factories and give people recognition for a job well done,” says Zarate. “But the data is really for our frontline workers so that they can improve processes.” 

Timely, consistent data makes this possible. “In the recent past, we invested significant time in gathering data and transforming it into different graphs and other sorts of tables to make a decision,” says Parra. “Now, we have that data directly from the line when it happens, giving us a much more accurate set of data that’s consistent across the different areas. It’s changing everything because we’re not just digesting figures—we’re asking the questions that we might not have known to ask before.”

Contemplating a bright future

Robledo looks forward to expanding the system. “We’re seeing solid benefits in our pilot bakeries,” she says. “We have a whole vision for an end-to-end value chain based on IoT technology.” Adds Rivera, “We regard this system as our first step in creating a world-class supply chain efficiency model with processes connected with Azure technology. The technology helps us achieve our goal of democratizing data so that everyone can get the most value from it.”

The leadership team focuses on innovating to lead its industry in a constantly changing world. “We want to have that data to change everything, including our own roles,” muses Para. “The way we manufacture bread in the future will be very different from the way we manufacture bread today. For us, the Azure IoT technologies we’re implementing are key to greater efficiency through data analytics. We’re just starting. The potential is immense.”

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