When empty belts burn money | Ep 6

Mikkel Svold (00:02):
You see these bottles just racing by high pace, super high speed, getting filled up.

Gregors Geilager (00:10):
Yeah, I think you are describing the perfect image. When I go out in production, I see conveyor belts running without any loads on them. Why are they running? Why are they not stopping it when they have no bottles on there? You are using a lot of energy when you have the conveyor belt running and no load on it. So stop it.

(00:30):
The benefit of a frequency converter and the energy saving is enormous. When you’re reducing the speed by only 20%, you have half in your energy bill. That’s how much you save with a frequency converter.

Mikkel Svold (00:45):
Picture a conveyor belt. Maybe it’s your own belt running at full speed. In theory, the perfect scenario that would be high throughput, products racing by, and basically money ticking in. But in practice, I think the picture is a little bit more muddy than that. So we have bottlenecks, we have queues, we may have machines in maintenance, and of course we have just simple thing as different speeds on different machines.

(01:12):
So in reality, in the food and beverage production, it’s all about timing production steps so they match each other. That is the way to maximize throughput and that is the way to minimize error and scrap and of course also save a lot of money and energy in the process. That we are talking about today and we are talking about how it’s done.

(01:33):
Welcome to the Food Tech Podcast. My name is Mikkel Svold and this podcast is brought to you by Au2mate. With me today, I have someone who knows an awful lot about balancing loads and paces in production lines, why it’s important and of course how it’s done. Gregors Geilager, welcome to you.

Gregors Geilager (01:50):
Thank you.

Mikkel Svold (01:53):
And Gregors, you are the director of Performance Drive at Danfoss Power Solutions. And I think a good place to start is from your perspective, what are the biggest efficiency challenges in modern food and beverage productions?

Gregors Geilager (02:09):
Yeah. So if you go back to year 2000, we paid one Danish krone per kilowatt-hour. And 20 years later, it was two krones per kilowatt-hour, so a doubling on energy efficiency cost. And then on top of that right now, maybe it has balanced itself down to one and a half krone or something like it. But we see high fluctuations on energy cost. So I think it’s fair to say that if you want to stay competitive in the food and beverage industry, focus on energy efficiency is key.

(02:46):
Otherwise, you simply lose your competitiveness and you’ll be running out of business. And you can, of course, say that now we talk about food and beverage, but this is a general industry issue. We are seeing this across sites. We’re also seeing it at Danfoss Drives where I’m sitting. We are challenged with exactly the same thing.

(03:09):
And for us, it’s about automating. It’s about robotic assembly. It’s about knowing where we use the energy and having constant focus on energy, on waste, on water consumption, on all these parameters that you can tweak to get a more competitive edge.

Mikkel Svold (03:28):
I think actually now for me, Danfoss Drives, as a Dane, it’s fairly obvious what you do, but just for the international listener who might not be familiar with what Danfoss Drives do, can you maybe just a brief fly-in?

Gregors Geilager (03:43):
Yeah. So I’m sitting at Danfoss Drives. We are a company that makes frequency converters or VSDs, which they also are called sometimes. And a frequency converter is a device for controlling the speed of an electrical motor. So basically, when you take an electrical motor and you put it into the power outlet, it will run with a constant speed. You cannot change it.

(04:08):
And that’s very inconvenient when you have something that needs to be tuned and tweaked. It’s like driving your car and it’s running 100 kilometers per hour and you cannot change it. That would be the same analogy here. So you need always to be able to control the speed to be able to optimize your flow and your throughput. And that’s basically what the frequency converter is doing.

Mikkel Svold (04:34):
Coming back to the food and beverage industry, can you maybe describe how you see a typical production line? And maybe also, is it different from any other types of production that you see out there?

Gregors Geilager (04:50):
Yeah. I think as said, it has a lot of similarities to other industries. We see a lot of conveyor belts. We see a lot of different machine types that needs to be coordinated. We see a lot of process steps throughout the production line, starting with some material flow into the production line. It might be water, it might be material of other kinds. It can be a PET blower blowing up bottles.

(05:23):
It can be many different things, but it starts with some material that needs to be brought to the production line. And already there, you have the first step that needs to be synchronized. You need to have something in the warehouse. You need to make sure that there is a constant flow of material into the production line. And then of course you have the PET blower that blows up the bottles and you fill in some liquids into it.

(05:47):
Then you put on a label, you’re capping it, and then you have it leaving the production line into a conveyor belt, and then it runs from there onto a palletizer that picks it up and puts it into bigger portions. And then from there, it’s getting transported over, it’s getting wrapped, it’s getting packed, and then it’s getting shipped out. So already there, you can see there are multiple different steps.

(06:16):
And in a modern factory like this, you’re not only doing Coca-Colas or soft drinks, you are doing other types of production there as well. So you need sometimes one day to do one production step and the other day to do another production step. Maybe you need to go from half a liter bottles to one and a half liter of bottles. So also the bottle part might differ.

(06:45):
And all this means that you need to be able to adjust this constantly. And therefore, when you go into a modern production line today, you will see thousands of frequency converters simply because you need to be able to control it.

Mikkel Svold (06:59):
Gotcha. Yeah, because I think everyone who’s been a child during the television era, which is basically everyone on the job market right now, everyone has seen those films of how it’s made from a food factory or a Coca-Cola factory or whatever it may be, where you see these bottles just racing by high pace, super high speed, getting filled up.

(07:27):
It just seems like everything is in such a perfect balance and everything happens at so high velocity that is unimaginable. That image that I tried to describe in the beginning of the podcast, do you recognize that image or how is it actually working?

Gregors Geilager (07:51):
Yeah, I think you are describing the perfect image. And of course, that’s at the end of the day where you want to get to. You want to have these bottles flying through the belt, you want to have full utilization of your equipment. You want to make sure you have so much throughput as you can have on the line. But it doesn’t start there.

(08:11):
It starts with a lot of fine-tuning. There is a lot of process steps that needs to be tuned to one another. And as said, you sometimes also need to adjust it on the way. But it doesn’t stop there. There are a lot of other things than just the throughput. Imagine if you are spending one liter extra per Coca-Cola you’re doing.

(08:36):
So if you’re using one liter or 1.5 liters for half a liter of Coca-Cola, it makes a difference. If you’re spending one kilowatt-hour for a production batch or you’re spending 1.05 kilowatt-hours per batch, it makes a difference because you have such a high velocity on your line. So you really need to go into the fine-tuning to get everything out of your production line.

Mikkel Svold (09:08):
Yeah. I remember we had an interview with the dairy production site. It was actually a filtration guy. I think it’s the first episode in this series actually or the second maybe. And what he talked about is that if you can increase the efficiency by 0.01% or something like that, it would be worth the work. Are we talking about the same minute, incremental improvements here or where would the lower threshold be, you think?

Gregors Geilager (09:44):
So it depends quite a bit on the machine type. So where you’ll see the most benefit is on centrifugal pumps. So if you’re looking at a system today where you’re not controlling the speed, but you’re doing it with throttling or bypassing, then you will see that the benefit of a frequency converter and the energy saving is enormous.

(10:09):
A centrifugal pump is using what we call the affinity law. It’s not complicated. It just means that the flow is directly related to the speed. So if you want half the flow, you want half the speed. But the power that you’re consuming is depending on the speed in third order.

Mikkel Svold (10:33):
Gotcha.

Gregors Geilager (10:34):
And that basically means when you’re reducing the speed by only 20%, you have only half of your energy consumption. So imagine that you can just remove or reduce your flow need by 20%, you have half in your energy bill. That’s how much you save with a frequency converter, because it allows you to be able to speed control it instead of throttling or bypassing.

Mikkel Svold (11:02):
I think we probably need to take one step back because I can’t be the only one listening to this who don’t know on my backbone what a frequency converter is. Can you just describe that in layman terms?

Gregors Geilager (11:20):
Yeah. So as said, the speed you normally have when you take a motor and you put it into the power outlet, you will see that it runs a constant speed, and the speed there is depending on the pole pair in the motor and then the frequency. And in Denmark, we have a fixed 50 hertz frequency. So when you have-

Mikkel Svold (11:42):
On the power outlet, right?

Gregors Geilager (11:43):
Yeah, exactly. So when you have a two-pole motor and you have 50 hertz, then the motor runs at 3,000 RPM. If you had a four-pole motor, it would run at 1,500 RPM and so forth. So you can change the speed by different motor types, but typically you have one motor that you’re using. So you have this fixed speed.

(12:05):
So basically, what the frequency converter is doing, it’s taking the power outlet energy and it’s transforming that to a DC supply and then it’s taking the DC supply and transforming it to an AC supply again. And the AC supply, we now have an ability to control. So we can change the frequency. And when we change the frequency, we basically also change the speed. And that’s also why it’s called a frequency converter because it’s changing the frequency basically.

Mikkel Svold (12:38):
Yeah. So basically, it’s a way to control the speed of the engine.

Gregors Geilager (12:43):
Yeah, correct.

Mikkel Svold (12:44):
That’s what it does. And now I want to jump to what kinds of real world applications would this… You just said that in a regular dairy production or a food and beverage production, whatever it may be, you’d see thousands of frequency converters. Where and why? Or in what situations?

Gregors Geilager (13:08):
Yeah. So I think I said, what we want to do is we want to achieve different things. So one thing, for instance, you want to achieve is process synchronization. So when you have multiple conveyor belts feeding into something, you want to control them and synchronize the performance of it. So that’s one way of using the frequency converter, simply to control the process. Then as said, you want to also use it for energy efficiency.

(13:38):
So when you have a pump and you’re not using the full flow, you want to reduce the flow simply to reduce your energy consumption. And then sometimes you also need to use it for what we call process precision. So let’s imagine you have a slaughterhouse and you’re slaughtering pigs and then you need to chop them up in the exact same weight or the exact same dimensions. And for that, you need very precise process control.

(14:11):
And there, typically, you’re also using some kind of a frequency converter that controls towards a position or a weight or something else. Then of course, we’re using it also in many cases to get information about the system. So the frequency converter is the electronic device that knows the condition of the motor.

(14:35):
So you’ll have a ton of data available that you can use for knowing something. So it’s actually typically when you compare it with a car, this is your eyes and your ears and your sensing equipment, and it’s difficult to drive the car without these sensors.

Mikkel Svold (15:00):
But can the frequency converter function as a sensor in itself or would you need a sensor to kind of obtain data from the converter?

Gregors Geilager (15:11):
Yeah. That’s a very relevant question. Back in the days, we had one sensor inside the frequency converter. That was about it. But today, the most modern frequency converter we now deliver has multiple different sensors included, so you don’t have to put external sensors to it.

Mikkel Svold (15:32):
Gotcha.

Gregors Geilager (15:33):
You can, if you want to. For instance, if you want to have a pump where you’re controlling it on the flow, you would typically have a flow sensor that you feed to the frequency converter so that it can control towards the flow. But basically, with the information we have in the frequency converter today, you can, for instance, see what is your quality of your power supply.

(15:54):
Are your phases balanced? Do you have too much harmonic distortion on your grid? You can see your current on your motor, so you know how fast the motor’s running. So with the current signal, we have quite a lot of information about the system.

(16:11):
We can also do analysis on the current and see indications of leakages, of belt wear-out and other things. So just by using the sensors that are already there, we get ton of information that we can transform to useful information for the end user.

Mikkel Svold (16:31):
So I just want to get this right. So basically, from the converters that you produce now, you get information that can feed into predictive maintenance of the belt, not just the frequency converter itself, but in the actual motors and the belt itself. Because you will then see, say if there’s a wear somewhere in the belt, it may use more power than usual, or how would you…

Gregors Geilager (17:02):
Yeah. So in the drive today, if you take a modern drive, you would have a condition-based monitoring included in the drive. So the drive itself is using the sensors that is available to make sense out of what is out there. So the drive includes a machine learning algorithm. So it’s running over a period of time and learn what normal should look like.

(17:28):
So if it has been running for a week or two weeks, it has passed its learning period and then it knows when I’m running at this speed, I should be consuming somewhere around this power. And then for instance, if you have a pump again and you suddenly have a sock coming into your pump inlet, the pump will say, “Well, now I’m consuming a lot more energy that is needed.”

Mikkel Svold (17:56):
That’s basically what happens when you’re vacuum cleaning and you put a sock in the tube and you can just hear the engine go…

Gregors Geilager (18:02):
Yeah, exactly.

Mikkel Svold (18:03):
All the way up. That’s the same thing. I hope that’s not a typical problem with a sock in the production line.

Gregors Geilager (18:11):
No.

Mikkel Svold (18:11):
That’s a bit gross, but another object then.

Gregors Geilager (18:14):
Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. But typically, what we do see in modern industries today, we see a lot of cavitation as an example. So not a sock.

Mikkel Svold (18:23):
What is that?

Gregors Geilager (18:25):
Cavitations are air bubbles that implodes.

Mikkel Svold (18:28):
Gotcha.

Gregors Geilager (18:29):
So when you don’t have enough water into your pump and you’re pumping more than the water supply is able to feed you, then you have small bubbles around your impeller blade. And these bubbles, they implode just around the impeller blade. So it’s not an explosion, it’s an implosion. So the bubble implodes.

(18:53):
And when it does this, it’s deteriorating your impeller blade. So your pump simply gets worn out. You will see a lot of marks on your pump blade, which is kind of small explosions on your pump blade that has removed material.

Mikkel Svold (19:11):
I’m actually pretty sure this happened to one of my friends who has… it’s not an industrial pump, it’s a pump because there’s a lot of water in his garden and it was just pumping dry basically. And I’m quite sure it broke the pump, and that may be what has happened.

Gregors Geilager (19:28):
Yeah. I’m not sure if that has been cavitation, but cavitation in food and beverage industry is a common problem. And today you have a lot of sensors, external sensors attached to it where you are measuring it. Typically, it’s done by sound. You can actually hear when you have cavitation, you have this granular noise on your pump, but we can actually do it just looking at the current measurement in the frequency converter.

(19:56):
And then based on that, we can say, “Well, the pump is cavitating now,” and then we can reduce the speed so that we are not having higher flow than what the inlet allows us to. And you see that when you have too little input, but you can also see it when you have a mesh or some kind of filtering that is clogged. So it happens in many different conditions.

(20:22):
But we are also, of course, seeing vibration challenges. We’re seeing like the sock example I came with, but you will also, for instance, see leakages on your pipe. So when you have a leakage, you’re expecting to meet a certain pressure in your pipe system, but now there is no pressure there. So you are actually able to run with lower power than what you usually have. So different conditions occur differently on the current in relation to speed.

Mikkel Svold (20:56):
And now this makes sense to me that you can obtain data on how the flow is and from whatever comes back from the frequency converter, you can then deduct whether it’s a leakage or it’s something that’s stuck or if it’s wear and tear or something like that, you would be able to see that basically on the graph. Where does all this data go?

(21:25):
Because I presume that it’s not just captured in one of those 1,000 units that you have out there and you have to go around with a USB stick. I presume it’s captured in some kind of SCADA or MES system. Where would you capture all this?

Gregors Geilager (21:42):
Today, everything we do is connected to some kind of measuring system or a SCADA system or a building automation system or whatever it is. And all the data that we have in the frequency converter is basically accessible. So you access, for instance, it’s typical to see the motor speed out of the frequency converter because you don’t have a sensor there. You have the frequency converter telling you how fast the motor is running.

(22:12):
So today already you have a lot of maintenance and surveillance over your system fed by information you’re getting from the frequency converter. So the frequency converter basically tells you which speed you’re running at, how much pressure you’re producing, your position of your rotor, many different things. Now the drive is also able to give you data on the condition of your application.

(22:41):
Do you have winding stress in your motor? Should you start planning replacing your motor because the motor is getting stressed out? Do you have bearing issues? Do you have wear and tear on your pump where your pump over time has been drifting away from the ideal situation?

(23:02):
That is information that the frequency converter will provide via the fieldbus into your SCADA system. And then it’s a normal warning system, like any other warning system. It’s just a flag being raised, “Be aware this is happening,” and then there needs to be an operator doing something about it.

Mikkel Svold (23:19):
Yeah. So it’s a flag being raised when you get outside of certain borders of performance, basically. Or do you need an AI to interpret that now is something happening? Or would that be the way to do it today because it’s also AIE?

Gregors Geilager (23:37):
Yeah. So there are many different ways of doing it. I think a lot of frequency converter manufacturers today are putting everything into the cloud and then there needs to be some cloud computing. And what the frequency converter is basically doing is providing data through the cloud and then all the logic is in the cloud. At Danfoss, we have taken a different approach. We want to have the logic inside the drive so that the drive is the sensor and the calculation power, and then it’s sending the flag to the operator.

Mikkel Svold (24:07):
Why?

Gregors Geilager (24:08):
We don’t believe that we are the expert in the system, so we are not the ones that can say what was wrong with the system, but we can give a warning that there needs to be a service guy called for. Something is out of the ordinary, and then it’s an early warning typically.

(24:25):
So we start seeing drifting, and then it’s giving you an alarm before you’re into a critical state. So you don’t need to plan your service during the weekends or at night shifts where it’s super expensive, and that gives a lot of benefits.

Mikkel Svold (24:42):
I think this way of running a factory, it sounds like something that you would actually have been able to do long before even cloud computing, but the flags would just be raised in a different manner in a less tech way. But is this something that you see, all beverage and food productions, do they all have this implemented already? Or is it not as trivial as one would think?

Gregors Geilager (25:15):
I think very few has it today.

Mikkel Svold (25:18):
Really?

Gregors Geilager (25:19):
Yeah. That’s the problem here. I think a lot of the optimization has happened over years that they have the machines running and they have been tuning the process and the throughput, but they have really not looked at energy efficiency. When I go out in production, I see conveyor belts running without any loads on them.

(25:40):
Why are they running? Why are they not stopping it when they have no bottles on there or no cargo on there? And then people typically say, “Well, there is no loading, so I’m not using a lot of energy.” Well, you are using a lot of energy when you have the conveyor belt running and no load on it. So stop it.

Mikkel Svold (25:59):
And you’re also wearing it out.

Gregors Geilager (26:02):
Exactly.

Mikkel Svold (26:03):
Not as much, but still.

Gregors Geilager (26:05):
So it’s the same kind of thinking, why would you have light on your toilet if you’re not there? Turn off the light. There is no reason for consuming energy unless you are in there, right? And it’s the same thing. I’m still thinking that there is a lot of optimization capabilities in the factories, in trying to optimize for energy efficiency.

(26:31):
And one of the things, for instance, you will not see today is when you have a pump that is feeding into a process, the SCADA system is controlling the speed and saying, “You need to deliver this flow.” And then the pump is just running and the drive is just controlling towards the flow, but there is no monitoring of the conditions of the pump.

(26:53):
So the SCADA system will just tell the drive, “I need more flow, run fast, run faster, run faster.” But maybe there was something wrong with it, maybe the efficiency has gone down and now you’re pumping inefficiently. And there should have been a call saying, “Well, I’m actually spending more on pumping the same amount compared to what I historically did.”

Mikkel Svold (27:18):
I want to just come back because my mind lingered on this that you say very few actually have this implemented where they can actually control dynamically whether to start or stop a belt running. Do you think that this is because the return on investment on investing in an intelligent SCADA system that can basically cooperate with the frequency converters out there controlling all that?

(27:48):
Because if you have thousands of different motors running, it’s not a manual process. You’d have to have some sort of automated system that does this for you. Is it because it’s simply too expensive to implement that it’s cheaper to just let the belt run?

Gregors Geilager (28:04):
I think it has a lot to do with knowledge. I think it’s easy to buy a conveyor belt that runs a constant speed and then you throw on some kind of meat and then it’s just running. And you don’t have to do considerations. You don’t have to do process control or anything. You just say, “Well, this is a conveyor belt and this is not the critical part of my application.” The critical part is the chopping of the meat or the filling into-

Mikkel Svold (28:35):
Weighing out the boxes and stuff like that.

Gregors Geilager (28:38):
Exactly. That’s the critical part and that’s where you have had your focus. But I think actually there is just as much optimization need in some of the other processes if you want to have a super efficient production line. And I said at the beginning, I think this is essential if we want to stay competitive in a high wages country like Denmark.

Mikkel Svold (29:00):
Yeah. And also one could presume that energy is not necessarily getting cheaper right now and just the fact that I’ve done quite a few interviews with energy relation and just the fact that you can actually control how much power your production line is consuming.

(29:19):
And now one should bear in mind, the listeners out there, if you’re not the head of a big production yourself, one should bear in mind that many people, if they can turn down production just slightly, they can then sell that flexibility actually to the power outlet or to the power company. What’s it called? The power producers, right? So that in itself, building that flexibility in, that could still be pretty clever, right? And also, that’s not even mentioning ESG and all this.

Gregors Geilager (29:59):
But you’re completely right. And I can look at our own company and say, “Well, if you go back five years, we didn’t have a lot of focus on energy efficiency. We didn’t have an ESG target. We didn’t look much at it.” Of course, we looked at it and say, “Well, where the biggest saving is and where you can do a good return on investment you want to do.”

(30:20):
But the focus we have had in the recent years also bringing us to a ESG-neutral company today, it’s enormous. The change that we have seen in the factory, the optimization chasing every cubic liter of water that we’re using or any kilowatt-hour we can reduce and investing in it, it has been quite a journey for us.

Mikkel Svold (30:47):
And I think also that in food and beverage, this must be something that the very large producers, they already think like this because they have extra people with just this responsibility. I know there’s not really such thing as a medium-sized beverage or food producer, but still, if you’re not the top 10 sized ones, you may be just the head of production and it’s your responsibility to do these optimizations. And it’s hard to give focus, but because the big players, your competitors, they are doing it, they’re going to push you out of the market. Is that correct or am I presuming? Am I too hard?

Gregors Geilager (31:35):
I think that’s exactly what is happening. You are losing your competitive edge. You might be good at producing your value, your food, your drinks. It might have a high quality, but it’s too costly because you’re spending too much water, you’re spending too much energy, and that means that at the end of the day, your prices are higher than your competitors are.

Mikkel Svold (32:01):
Gregors, I want to ask you one of the last questions. If I was the listener out there and I’m the head of production at a large medium-sized dairy production, where would I start and what are the challenges that I should expect?

Gregors Geilager (32:22):
Yeah. So typically, what I recommend people to do is go through production line and look for anything in the production line where you are heating up stuff, cooling down stuff, have motion that is not needed, have illumination where it’s not needed. So that was the light on the toilet as an example. But it’s actually also about cooling and heating.

(32:49):
If you have an oven, if you’re doing cookies and you have an oven where you’re heating up for the cookies, can you take that excess heat and use it somewhere else in the process? Can you reuse the cooling that you have if you’re cooling down stuff and reuse that somewhere else?

(33:08):
You can use heat exchanges, you can do different things with that energy, but think about anything that is not a status quo as a source of energy for you. So if it’s not dark, if it’s not at the temperature you have in Denmark, so freezing cold, or if it’s no motion, then you basically have an energy source.

Mikkel Svold (33:33):
Gotcha. Gotcha. And what challenges should one expect?

Gregors Geilager (33:41):
That you will not see the same return on investment in all the cases. Start with your pumps. Everything needs to be controlled on a pump. There is very, very, very few pumps where you shouldn’t put on a drive as standard. And then look at these obvious ones, a conveyor belt that is not having load on it half of the time or 20% of the time.

(34:08):
Save half of the energy there or even more. So the obvious places, go there first. And then I think getting information about where you’re using your energy. And again, here, if you have frequency converters, it will tell you how much energy you have consumed on the line. So it will tell you how much energy have you produced or used for the batch that you have. So taking the information that is already at hand and using them to monitor your system.

Mikkel Svold (34:43):
If you think a little bit ahead, where do you think the next big efficiency gain comes from? Is that from more integration like this or is it from, say, smarter drives or better use of data? Or where do you see the next efficiency gain?

Gregors Geilager (35:01):
Yeah. So I think definitely this condition-based monitoring that I don’t think many are using today will have a huge impact because it’s helping in many different ways. So it’s first of all, of course, giving you the direct benefit of predicting service need so you can plan your service, and already there, there is a lot of money. It also gives you information for your service guy.

(35:26):
So you typically have less and less skilled people, unfortunately. And that means that when you have information to the service guy that in this case, it’s related to the piping system, the pump, then you need to know or you need to call a blacksmith and not an electrician. So you have information that helps you in your service. But what it also does is it’s giving you early warning so you can plan. If it’s a motor that is breaking down, you can prepare for rewinding of the motor or whatever it is.

(36:04):
And then it’s giving you energy efficiency because again, here, if you have the pump that has been running inefficiently, you don’t know about it today. And now you actually have something that provides you data that says that I have been drifting away from the ideal for a period of time. So I can see these CBM, condition-based monitoring features as some of the levers for really stepping up on energy efficiency in the future.

(36:30):
And I think we have just seen the start of this journey. With more AI, with more machine learning, it will be enormous what the equipment can do. We will see more and more autonomous machines that does more and provide more data.

Mikkel Svold (36:46):
Yeah. So I think, just to sum up a little bit, a good place to start for anyone out there would be start getting control of your data and do so by implementing frequency converters that can capture data and other kinds of sensors that can capture data.

(37:04):
And then assembling that data to leverage the different functionalities that you then have out there and to leverage also the flow of production to match each other so you don’t have, like you say, belts running empty, which is just a waste of energy and wear and tear on your belts. Gregors Geilager, thank you so much for joining us. That’s all we have time for today. It was a pleasure.

Gregors Geilager (37:27):
Pleasure was mine.

Mikkel Svold (37:29):
And of course, to the listeners out there, if you found this exact topic very interesting, share it with one of your colleagues or competitors even if you think that would be beneficial for you, but share it with someone you know.

(37:41):
And of course, go ahead and give this podcast a like and maybe even follow it. That will really help us keep this show going and keep on delivering the value that I think is very, very valuable from the different experts that we talk to. So thank you so much for listening and see you in the next episode of the Food Tech Podcast.