Cargill site director gives a view from the factory floor—5G use cases aren’t clear and don’t justify in the investment
In a refreshing reality check from the Industrial 5G Forum (available on demand here), a site director for process manufacturing giant Cargill made clear that 5G isn’t, and likely won’t in the short term at least, play any sort of role in its operations. Cargill operates in 70 countries, has a staff of around 150,000, and does $165 billion in annual turnover. For Site Director Alexis Kydonopoulos, industrial 5G use cases are focused on mobility which isn’t a priority for the company, and use cases that are there can be handled by “well-established” Wi-Fi technology.
First, a note on the distinction between process and discrete manufacturing. Process manufacturing is all about following a static recipe wherein raw materials are combined—things like food and beverage, biotech, pharmaceuticals, and so forth. Discrete manufacturing, by contrast, is about individual components and assembling them into a product, like in the automotive industry which has been much more forward-leaning in exploring the applicability of 5G.
“For us,” Kydonopoulos said, “being a B2B business and in the production of raw materials…we’re not employing the 5G technology. The reason for that is relatively straightforward…From the nature of our manufacturing, it’s a little bit difficult to have value added in there to justify investments.” While Cargill is in the “very, very primitive steps” of evaluating 5G, he said right now it’s only presence in the sites (dedicated to producing chocolate) he oversees, 5G is only present by way of cellphone connections.
The primary issue here is around 5G as an enabler of mobility in an OT environment like a factory floor. Industrial 5G is billed by relevant vendors as enabling on-the-fly reconfiguration of assembly lines, something with no relevance to at least one major, global process manufacturer. Kydonopoulos said forklifts moving materials from one place to another are today supported by Wi-Fi, and, “I don’t see a specific advantage [from 5G] compared to using the well-established Wi-Fi technology.” That said, he did express interest in 5G to help monitor product once it leaves the factory and is loaded onto someone else’s trucks to be moved to someone else’s facility.
Asked if his sentiment was mainstream in the process manufacturing space, Kydonopoulos said, “I would think so…In the process parts of the industry like ourselves…you have to imagine my factories are big kitchens. You have big tanks, you have materials coming in, we cook them, we cool them down. Everything is static…It’s difficult to imagine some use cases there in the short term.”
