Accevo MES platform now live across seven factories on three continents, delivering multi-million savings and setting the foundation for a fully digitalized, data-led manufacturing ecosystem.
A long-term strategic partnership between Accevo and Imperial Brands PLC, one of the world’s leading consumer goods companies, has been confirmed to digitalize and standardize Imperial Brands’ global manufacturing operations.
The partnership formalizes two years of close collaboration and marks a significant milestone in Imperial Brands’ broader Manufacturing Excellence and Imperial Operating System (IOS) transformation program. The Accevo platform is already live and delivering measurable value across seven Imperial Brands factories in Europe, the United States and Asia – with further rollouts planned across the global network.
Results proven across 7 factories on 3 continents
The foundation of the partnership is the successful deployment of Accevo’s MES solution, designed to connect machines, people, and data in real time. The first phase of implementation focused on extended machine connectivity across Secondary department shop floors, edge-computing-based data acquisition and comprehensive microstop monitoring – giving factory teams instant, reliable visibility into line performance and the root causes of production losses.
Imperial Brands’ teams now work with live operator guidance interfaces, real-time line-status dashboards and LossTree drill-down capabilities that enable rapid identification and elimination of unplanned downtime. The implementation follows the “Stop the Stops” methodology, operationalizing the principle of zero-loss manufacturing through standardized, data-driven performance management aligned to the company’s Manufacturing Excellence standards.
The results already speak for themselves. In the first two years of the MES program, Imperial Brands achieved multi-million savings while improving both Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) across its operations.
A scalable architecture for global manufacturing
A defining feature of the partnership is the deployment model. Accevo’s infrastructure is hosted entirely on Microsoft Azure, operating in a distributed, edge-computing architecture that enables rapid factory onboarding. New sites can be brought online quickly and consistently, leveraging a standardized global template – without the complexity and lead times associated with traditional, on-premises deployments.
Despite the breadth and complexity of Imperial Brands’ global machine estate, Accevo’s platform has demonstrated the flexibility required to connect and monitor diverse equipment configurations – an area where Accevo brings deep domain expertise accumulated across decades of tobacco and consumer goods manufacturing deployments.
Towards a fully integrated digital operations ecosystem
The long-term partnership extends well beyond machine monitoring. Building on the MES foundation, the roadmap progressively expands Accevo’s platform to cover the full scope of manufacturing operations – from digitalized daily management and paperless shop floor workflows to full integration with Imperial Brands’ enterprise systems. Each phase is designed to deepen the single source of truth across the global factory network, enabling more consistent decision-making, stronger operational alignment and the data infrastructure required for advanced analytics and AI-driven optimization.
Together, these capabilities will give Imperial Brands a unified digital backbone across its manufacturing network – standardizing data, processes and performance management from the shop floor to executive reporting.
About Imperials Brands:
Imperial Brands PLC is a global consumer-focused company with a distinctive challenger role in the transforming tobacco and nicotine industry. Its portfolio spans combustible products, next generation products and smoke-free alternatives, with manufacturing operations across multiple continents.
More information: www.imperialbrandsplc.com
About Accevo:
Accevo delivers IT solutions for manufacturing, building a Smart Factory ecosystem that connects shop floor automation and analytics with business systems. Its MES platform and modules for OEE tracking, traceability, paperless operations, and production planning provide full digitalisation and real-time data flows. As part of the Dürr Group, Accevo combines the scale of a global engineering leader with the agility of an implementation-focused team.