Probiotical S.p.A. Creates Solid Foundation for Expansion-Driven Digital Transformation

Probiotical S.p.A., a leading Italian probiotic and postbiotic research and manufacturing company, was enjoying a huge rise in demand for its products and knew that it had to ramp up production significantly.

With ambitious foresight, it realized that it needed to accelerate its digital transformation across its entire production facilities. This would allow it to more effectively scale its operations and then run them as efficiently as possible, extracting the highest possible yield from its fermenters and packaging lines,

Rockwell Automation specialists were asked to identify and propose the best solution for Probiotical’s shopfloor data management for daily operations, and for integrating IT and OT landscapes. As a result, ThingWorx IIoT solution, part of the FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite, powered by PTC, has been identified and selected as the ideal solution to build  the foundation for its ongoing digital transformation.

Probiotical was experiencing exponential growth in demand for its diverse selection of probiotic and postbiotic strains and blends, with supplement-stick volumes rising from 1.5 million per annum up to 10 million.

With this level of growth, the company knew that it needed to establish incredibly tight operational data accuracy and actionable insights, to help ensure that any hard-fought economies of scale were not lost through inefficiency and waste. It also had to integrate new packaging lines with its existing assets and tie these into the optimized manufacturing flows.

“Initially we had very little joined-up visibility into our operations from a holistic perspective,” explains Gianmaria Camanna, COO at Probiotical. “But we knew that if we could get access to pertinent real-time and historic operational data, we would gain a far deeper understanding and, as a result, could undertake work to enhance our operations. Visibility is the key.”

“Probiotical needed to move quickly,” said Antoine Pris, Director of Enterprise Software Sales at Rockwell Automation. “As demand for its products accelerated, the company recognized that digital transformation would create a robust foundation to support its rapid expansion. This transformation would not only scale its operations but also ensure that time to market, efficiency, quality, and throughput were optimized.”

“We needed the right solution with the right level of support, and we needed a knowledgeable company to help us,” Camanna elaborates. “We quickly recognized the capabilities and value of the FactoryTalk InnovationSuite software. Rockwell Automation was selected to support us due to its industry expertise in food supplements, medical devices and drugs, as well as its software solutions and local system integrator support.”

The ThingWorx IIoT solution can connect a diverse array of disparate devices, applications and data sources, and then bring the resulting data to a single source so it can be aggregated and contextualized based on transactional information from ERP systems. This single source of truth allows users to manage, monitor and control a broad array of automation devices and software applications through one intuitive user interface.

Originally considered as a software cornerstone for a new highly digitalized plant to be commissioned in the summer of 2025, the deployment of the ThingWorx IIoT solution was expanded to include data capture from assets at an existing plant.

“As the project evolved, we realized that we could leverage data from our existing plant,” Camanna explains. “Not only does this give us some significant early wins, but it also gives us the chance to understand the platform in a real-world scenario before we roll it out to our new plant. As a result, we will be able to get to value far quicker at the new plant.”