Expertise in Food Factory Construction Meets New Technology to Create Innovation | Ajinomoto Engineering Corporation

Ajinomoto Engineering Corporation is an engineering service company for food and life sciences field founded in 1973. Construction, equipment and facility maintenance, and worldwide, food factory renovations are just a few of the exceptional services they continually provide for their customers. Ajinomoto pushes the food industry forward through their early focus on a factory’s lifecycle. This perspective allows Ajinomoto to create ideal proposals and solutions for their customers that advance the development their industry.

“Construction and maintenance of food factories requires special know-how and check criteria on food safety and production management. We are originated from a food company, and confident in our high-quality output with an expert’s perspective” states Mr. Takayuki Kobayashi of Digital Business Group at Kawasaki Branch. “Like many other industries, engineer shortage and aging of buildings and facilities are becoming serious challenges in the food factory industry. Our business was growing, but we needed to establish a new method for design-to-construction process to meet the clients’ demands.”

“In the past, we were repeating on-site surveys while preparing the work drawings to measure and check the location of facilities. Now with a laser scanner and InfiPoints to process the obtained point cloud data, we can do all such in our office utilizing the digital twin of the factory. This does not only reduce the lead-time of on-site survey to one-third, but also significantly improves the accuracy of the work drawings as well as the safety of workers,” emphasizes Mr. Kobayashi.

“We started utilizing the point cloud data also for the meetings with clients—3D-visualize the conceptual plan by placing the new facility to install (CAD model) in the digital twin of the current factory (point cloud). This helps the clients get a clearer picture of the construction plan compared to the meetings based on 2D drawings, so that we are able to receive valuable and detailed feedback during the pre-construction stage,” adds Mr. Takashi Muraoka of Project Dept. at Kawasaki Branch. “I believe that our design is more in line with the client’s requests through the point cloud utilization.”

“Our clients wish to share their point cloud data more widely among their stakeholders. Our engineers have explored the potential of point cloud utilization and wondered whether we could manage every stage from design to construction to maintenance of the plant all within the point cloud data,” states Mr. Kobayashi. “Facility management systems typically used tabular format data, a format which often frustrated users looking for necessary information. This frustration frequently led to databases not being updated because they required too much manual data input. Using InfiPoints, the digital twin of the factory can be updated with necessary data, such as PDF drawings, that make it quick and intuitive to access the necessary location information. I believe this will be an important innovation from a factory lifecycle perspective— design, facility management, spare parts management, and inspection management—utilizing point cloud data as a communication medium within their companies.”

“We built the cloud server as a platform to share point cloud data with the clients and their partner companies. We laser-scan the factories regularly, embed documents about their facility management, inspection plans, etc., and upload this data to the cloud server, providing the clients and their partner companies the ability to check the necessary information anytime via the internet,” states Mr. Atsuki Morohashi of Digital Business Group at Kawasaki Branch. “By sharing up-to-date factory information among stakeholders, we do not need to complete as many additional on-site surveys, documents, and meetings prior to maintenance work. This dramatically improves the work quality as well as efficiency for us as well as the stakeholders.”

“We believe that we offer an innovative customer experience and continue to enhance the value of our service by adopting new technologies, e.g., point cloud on the cloud server. As the industry leader in food factory construction, we are committed to staying innovative, and utilizing point cloud data across the entire factory lifecycle,” concludes Mr. Kobayashi.