Procter & Gamble Grooming standardizes remote access across its production lines
Index
About
Procter & Gamble is one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. A multinational, multi-billion-dollar enterprise, P&G manufactures a number of iconic, trusted brands including Gillette, Tide, Aerial and Oral-B.
In our customer’s
own words
Electrical Platform Leader,
Procter & Gamble
“We want to maintain a high level of standardization, not just digitally, but physically. With Secomea, we can support our sites centrally”
The challenge
Enforcing consistent maintenance operations across sites
Within P&G’s Grooming division and several participating business units, manufacturing operations rely on a diverse range of industrial equipment deployed across multiple global production sites. This diversity increases the complexity of keeping maintenance processes consistent, secure, and compliant.
“When we couldn’t connect remotely, production sites would often take big liberties with making changes on their own. That might work in the short term, but it’s impossible to maintain over the long term”, shared P&G’s Electrical Platform Leader when describing the need to establish a uniform approach to machine access and maintenance across their operations.
World-leading production lines demand best-in-class maintenance processes, especially when rolling out new products and retooling lines to meet new production requirements. Engineers and technicians must be able to support operations quickly, whether through programming adjustments or device data collection.
At the same time, global production environments introduce additional complexity. Large industrial networks increase maintenance coordination challenges and, if managed poorly, could slow production or create operational risks. In this context, keeping OT remote access simple, secure, and centrally manageable is critical.
P&G needed a remote access solution that could help standardize processes across their participating sites, accelerate rollouts, and maintain a high level of security. To achieve these goals, they turned to Secomea.
The solution
Replacing multiple tools with a single solution easy to set up and use
Besides looking for a secure remote access solution for their manufacturing operations, P&G also needed a system that could be installed and configured easily without disrupting ongoing production.
Secomea’s gateways are designed with compatibility in mind, enabling quick deployment in industrial environments and allowing teams to connect equipment without complex setup procedures.
“Secomea does a great job at handling configuration. They have preconfigured setup files for a number of different commonly used industrial machines. We can use a variety of industrial control systems and computers depending on the requirements of the manufacturing equipment (…) By having everything preconfigured, we could get up and running quickly. We did an evaluation, and it worked out of the box”, commented P&G’s Electrical Platform Leader.
Secomea’s ease of implementation and administration is matched by its user-friendliness for remote technicians. Through Secomea’s access client, technicians can select the machines they need to service from an easy-to-read drop-down menu immediately after logging into their programming terminal.
This approach enables technicians to access equipment remotely with minimal friction, making remote maintenance as intuitive as working directly on-site.
“To the end user, it’s no different than plugging into the device directly. There’s no extra configuration needed on their computer or virtual machine; it’s almost seamless” added Procter & Gamble’s Technology Director.
The result
Centralized user management and improved control over remote maintenance
Secomea enabled P&G’s Engineering and IT teams to manage user access to OT assets across participating production sites through a single platform.
P&G implemented a privately hosted central IAM server, providing stronger protection against cyber threats while allowing administrators to manage remote access centrally.
Rather than operating multiple remote access tools across different machines and locations, system administrators can now manage access to equipment from a centralized environment, simplifying oversight and improving operational consistency.
Thanks to centralized access management, administrators can grant or restrict remote access more easily while helping ensure compliant conduct across participating production facilities.
“The access management system was a huge win. Secomea lets us selectively add remote access users at the machine level. Being able to work with our sites centrally makes our processes so much more successful than they could have been. It’s helped us respond quickly, at a low cost”, commented P&G’s Technology Director.
