The components of the new industrial revolution, such as the Internet of industrial products, Big Data, and artificial intelligence, bring innovative approaches to all aspects of life. Especially thanks to the rapid development in technology, the production process in factories is evolving to an entirely different point. Having discovered that efficient manufacturing now means intelligent manufacturing, many organizations have already adapted to the future with smart factories by accelerating their digital transformation!

British American Tobacco (BAT), which continues its production with 55 manufacturing facilities in 48 countries and employs more than 55,000 people, is also among the companies involved in this transformation process.

BAT Turkey, Samsun factory is one of the top 5 plants with the largest capacity, and production volume in 55 production plants worldwide and one of the top 2 plants in Europe and North Africa. BAT Turkey, whose total investment in Turkey exceeds 2 billion dollars, employs 3,000 people directly and indirectly.

To establish an active operating base for the future in digital transformation processes at less cost and to monitor and control production processes in a much healthier way, BAT Turkey has established a collaboration with NGN Smart Digital, which started in Turkey and spread to global.

In the project within the scope of cooperation, the manual control and counting processes on the BAT Samsun plant production line were digitized by NGN with AI (Artificial Intelligence) Application developed within the framework of the needs and demands of BAT Turkey and connected to an automatic counting system.

NGN implemented the project in a short period of 4 months with the support and guidance of Hasan Ugur, senior business analyst for Europe and North Africa, and the BAT Information&Digital Technology team at BAT Turkey's Samsun plant. Prior to the project, since the number of products manufactured on the production line on which the project was implemented could be determined manually and based on estimations, the error margin of this estimation was a factor affecting both waste amounts and production efficiency negatively. With this project, both productivity and inventory accuracy for the related product have been improved, with the correct product count rate reaching up to 99.7%. 

Director of Information & Digital Technologies in charge of BAT TCNA (Turkey, Caucasus, and North Africa) region, Öğünç Aksoy shared his views on the union that has become a success story as follows:

"Digitalization is expected to generate $ 3.7 trillion in additional revenue in the industry, $ 1.7 in smart city applications, $ 1.6 in health applications, and $ 11 trillion in total by 2025. As BAT Turkey, we have given momentum to our digital transformation process with this artificial intelligence-based application. Even when the project was still in the prototype phase, we had experienced that artificial intelligence could meet our needs far beyond human power. As well as making the application more comfortable, faster, and perfect, making it almost error-free; another essential feature was that it was user-friendly. The production counting process, which was previously only carried out by the estimation method and which is now is completed by just taking a photo of the tray with the manufactured products standing on it and by loading it onto the application, started to deliver 99.7% accuracy in just 30 seconds.

On the other hand, the success of this application, which BAT Turkey developed with NGN, has also brought a voice in other countries of the group, and our project has become a benchmark.

It's a special pride for us. After Turkey, our application was started to be used in both the BAT Poland and the BAT Uzbekistan factory after a short adaptation process, and similar productivity growth was achieved here as well. As a result, we have reached a global agreement with NGN to implement the project in a total of 20 countries, mainly in the European and North African markets.

I want to underline that it is crucial to work with a business partner who will walk arm in arm with you in this process, analyse your needs correctly, provide you with specific solutions and get quick support as well as your roadmap for digitalization.

In that sense, NGN is far beyond just being a technology partner. We plan to continue our investments in intelligent factory systems of our digital transformation process.

We wish to continue our cooperation with NGN in different projects that will improve product quality and efficiency by reducing costs by providing a holistic performance and Operation Management facility that will significantly improve our productivity growth.’