The Razor Edge Standardizing Remote Access with P&G Across global production rollouts

How the world’s largest consumer goods company enables remote maintenance with Secomea

If you’re alive in the 21st century, you’ve probably used a Procter & Gamble product. The company, and its brands, are ubiquitous. P&G is, in its own words, “trusted in millions of living rooms, kitchens, laundry rooms, and bathrooms”. This is no exaggeration – Gillette one of, P&G’s renowned personal grooming brands, is at the cutting edge of the market.

The challenge: Standardizing Remote Maintenance over distributed lines

World-leading production lines demand best in class maintenance processes. When new products roll out and lines retool to match, it’s essential that engineers and technicians can support the processes quickly, be it via device data collection, or programming adjustments.

Yet global presence invites global risks. Large industrial networks invite upscale maintenance complexity, which, if managed poorly, could slow production to a crawl. In such a space, keeping remote access simple to manage is a must.

P&G Grooming needed a remote access solution that would standardize processes, speed up rollouts while remaining secure. To achieve that target, Procter & Gamble turned to Secomea Remote Access.

“When we didn’t have the ability to connect remotely, 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.”

– Greg, Electrical Platform Leader, Procter & Gamble

The solution: In-house access management

Procter & Gamble operates a diverse range of equipment in global production sites. Consequentially, P&G’s business depends on keeping manufacturing maintenance on tight and compliant. P&G’s core requirement was that a common access process could be enforced, to the same level of rigor, at all global sites at the same time.

“We want to maintain a high level of standardization, not just digitally, but physically. With the Secomea platform, we can support our sites centrally.”

– Greg, Electrical Platform Leader, Procter & Gamble

Cybersecure Access for Industry-Leading Networks

Secomea remote access suited P&G’s needs. With Secomea, P&G’s Engineering & IT departments can manage access for multiple users and devices in one program. Rather than maintaining multiple access software solutions for differing devices, system administrators can manage access to all devices, over a central IAM server.

This central IAM server, called GateManager, is hosted privately on the platform of P&G’s choosing, proofing sensitive information against troublesome cybersecurity threats. Unsurprisingly, all-in-one centralization takes the chaos out of administering maintenance tasks. Instead of grappling with the challenges of each site independently managing permissions, P&G’s Engineering & IT departments can provision, or constrain, remote access, from their main office. Ensuring compliant conduct becomes a matter of ease.

“The access management system was a huge win. The GateManager lets us selectively add remote access users at the machine level. Being able to work with our sites centrally helps make our platform so much more successful than it could have been. It’s helped us respond quickly, at a low cost.”

– Mark, Technology Director, Procter & Gamble

Secure Operations: Minimizing confusion, maximizing speed

But rapid remote maintenance doesn’t begin and end with the particulars of network management – it also needs to be easy to install. Barring this, a remote maintenance tool requiring intricate configuration and setup might have disrupted P&G’s existing processes. Fortunately for P&G, Secomea remote access is designed with compatibility in mind.

“Secomea does a good job of handling configuration. They have preconfigured files for a number of different commonly used industrial machines. We can use a variety of industrial controls systems and computers depending on the requirements of the manufacturing equipment (…) by having everything preconfigured, we can get up and running quickly. – We did an evaluation and it worked out-of-the box.”

– Greg, Electrical Platform Leader, Procter & Gamble

This intuitive experience isn’t only felt in installation and administration. To ensure a high level of maintenance, remote technicians need to feel just as comfortable using Remote Access as they would performing maintenance in-person. 

Secomea Remote access makes tasks intuitive with an easy-to-read drop-down menu, immediately accessible to technicians upon logging into their programming terminal. P&G’s technicians are now only a screen away from maintenance tasks.

“To the end user, it’s no different than plugging into the device directly. There’s no extra configuration to their computer or virtual machine, it’s almost seamless.”

– Mark, Technology Director, Procter & Gamble

Procter & Gamble is among the industry-leaders embracing next-generation access with Secomea. Would you like to explore how Secomea could enhance your business? Get in touch with us and learn more.