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Aker BioMarine Embarks on a Data-driven Expedition

The krill producer unites a sea of data from different parts of the organization, providing clear visibility into manufacturing and supply chain operations.

Aker BioMarine's Antarctic Endurance is the world's first purpose-built krill harvesting vessel equipped with Eco-Harvesting technology.
Aker BioMarine's Antarctic Endurance is the world's first purpose-built krill harvesting vessel equipped with Eco-Harvesting technology.
Aker BioMarine

If you are a health-conscious consumer, you may be aware of the benefits of Omega-3 fatty acids for your heart, eyes, liver, brain, skin, and joints. Add some phospholipids, choline, and astaxanthin in there and you have the ingredients of Superba Krill, Aker BioMarine’s next-generation krill oil supplements harvested—and processed—on the pristine waters of Antarctica.

Aker BioMarine is a Norwegian fishing and biotech company that believes in the effective health benefits of the small but powerful crustacean known as krill. So much so, the company has developed a patented technology for krill harvesting that protects the crustacean as it is brought on board the fishing vessel.

To that end, Aker BioMarine has four “floating factories,” as each fishing vessel in its fleet is a highly complex, custom-built manufacturing site that produces krill meal immediately after the harvest in order to preserve product quality. On a good day in Antarctica, one vessel can harvest 1,200 tons of krill, which becomes 250 tons of meal that are put into bags and transported to its Houston manufacturing plant for further processing and packaging in order to be sold to customers around the world.

It is a huge undertaking for a small to medium-sized company like Aker BioMarine that only has about 300 employees. The company doesn’t have the luxury of leaning on thousands of data scientists to crunch the production and supply chain numbers—resources much larger organizations are able to use to increase efficiencies.

So, while there is so much technology and traceability built-in to the krill production process, the biotech firm had no visibility into asset utilization or the supply chain or the sustainable management of the fisheries—until now.

A few years ago, Aker BioMarine embarked upon a mission to move away from compiling data manually that resulted in producing rough calculations once a month, to automatically pulling data from control systems, sensors, and instrumentation in a way that operators and engineers could easily understand on-demand.

The company turned to the Cognite Data Fusion platform, which leverages machine learning, generative AI, simulation, and content contextualization to make sense of data from a variety of sources. The Cognite platform drives digital transformation through Cognite AI, Industrial Canvas, Open Industrial Digital Twins, and Industrial DataOps.

Now, using the software to track three million data points, Aker BioMarine saw a significant reduction in both unit cost of operation and downtime from improved operations, and increased output from new machinery.

A data—and time—investment

This a great digital transformation success story. But it did not happen overnight.  

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