Panike, Portugal’s leading supplier of frozen bakery and pastry products, joined forces with Axians for an exploratory project designed to optimise its production processes using artificial intelligence and digital twins. The valuable experience gained should also serve the VINCI Energies ICT brand’s other customers well.
Panike is Portugal’s leading supplier of frozen bakery and pastry products. This family business, founded in 1986, now generates turnover of over €90 million and distributes its products in 16 countries, including 10 in Europe.
With 12 production lines across three sites, Panike faces significant challenges in terms of automating its processes, aggregating data and visualising operations. The manufacturer is seeking to permanently optimise downtime, reduce waste, increase production and minimise its impact on the environment.
To help with this ambition, the company’s telecoms supplier introduced its own partner Axians, the VINCI Energies ICT brand, to present its IAPM (intelligent asset and performance management) solution, a tool focused on asset management and predictive maintenance.
João Domingues, Innovation Lead at Axians Portugal explains: “After several sessions to evaluate needs and acquire process-specific knowledge, Axians asked Actemium, the VINCI Energies industry brand, to join the sessions and provide support on one of the needs Panike had identified: the automation of one of its production units. But at the time, Panike’s strategic context was not conducive to launching a project of this kind.”
Self-financed POC
“Nevertheless,” he continues, “given our relationship with Panike and our confidence in the potential results, we offered them a self-financed project to study the impact AI and Digital Twins would have on its industrial processes according to the identified maturity of its data. The decision to self-finance this project was an important step, which enabled Panike to participate and share information, knowledge and data, while benefiting from our expertise in innovation.”
After a detailed analysis of the data, mostly at factory and business-process level, Axians identified and proposed several improvements and the implementation of best practices to Panike’s SAP processes, and the creation of Advanced Analytics’ dashboards to aggregate information from multiple sources.
Following this study, Axians produced a detailed maturity report, which helped identify the quickest gains and the transformation projects with the greatest impacts.
Measuring the on-site potential of AI and Digital Twins
On completion of the feasibility study on applying these technologies to improve production KPI’s, a quality and energy consumption simulator were developed for the production line, along with an intelligent production order planning system.
“We explored Panike’s production data from its ERP (enterprise resource planning) and real-time data from on-site sensors trough SCADA,” says João Domingues, “in order to assess the potential of a virtual assistant based on AI optimisation and prediction algorithms and identify use cases such as production process optimisation, improvements in quality and sustainability KPIs, and asset management with predictive maintenance.”
The Axians manager continues: “This initiative allowed our team and the business units involved in the project to acquire and consolidate their business knowledge of Panike, and in particular, to assess the potential for applying AI, Digital Twins and advanced Analytics to solve core issues in this market segment.”
These gains include optimisation, efficiency and sustainability in Panike’s production processes, and also the introduction of prediction into its process management.
“This initiative allowed our team to acquire and consolidate their knowledge, and also to assess the potential of AI, Digital Twin and Advanced Real-Time Analytics.”
Lessons learned
While this collaboration with Panike remains exploratory for the moment, it already stands as a benchmark project. “This helps underpin our innovation and market strategy,” says João Domingues. “We have presented proposals to new customers and received positive feedback on specific AI-based needs such as predictive maintenance, intelligent planning assistants, and assisted knowledge management, however the best feedback is on the Digital Twin solution. Axians is currently integrating smart manufacturing service planners, What-if scenario simulation and quality control assistants based on computer vision into a digital twin ecosystem for this market with its own IP and internal development teams, giving the agility to customize their approach to new client’s ecosystems and challenges.”
Axians Portugal is pursuing other commercial developments, while Actemium Portugal, and other Axians and Actemiums from the group are also leveraging Panike reference and delivered solutions to approach prospective customers with positive feedback.
Panike itself saw a marked 20% reduction in planned downtime for product changeovers during the Axians trial period and may now be more inclined to take risks in order to optimise its production processes using AI. Also the benefit of using Axians Digital Twin for simulation different scenarios on energy savings by testing different configurations compared to the non-conformity products generated, also opened the door for the benefits of dynamic adjustments on the workstations setups for the more than 70 different recipes Panike produces.
28/03/2025
