Flame cutting and blasting
An international steel group operating several flame cutting plants (>1000 employees) wants a cross-plant overview by networking a heterogeneous machine park. For this purpose, we connected and retrofitted various machines and sensors to create the basis for continuous improvement processes based on real-time data.
Company profile
The customer is an international steel group, which finishes steel sheets in a wide range of production processes for various industries. The company requires digital integration of the various production lines into a cross-site system. Both old and new plants at the various production sites have to be connected.
Industry:
Steel processing
Employees:
> 1000
Project duration:
6 months
Connected machines:
11 machines at 2 factories
Machine types:
Plasma cutting, oxyfuel cutting, shot blasting
Initial situation and implementation
The company supplies high-quality products and is one of the market leaders in the industry. In order to increase throughput through a continuous improvement process, the company needed cross-factory transparency of the current production processes. The particular challenge was that the company has an extremely heterogeneous machine park, which consists of different machines and production processes from various manufacturers. Both new and old machines, some of which are more than 10 years old, are used.
We connected the systems via additional sensors or direct connection via the PLC and then trained the personnel, from machine operators to plant managers, in the operation of the software.
Together with the employees of the two production sites, we have developed various dashboards that are specifically tailored to their needs.
Result
The implemented system provides the management with a real-time overview of the production processes at the respective sites. The results are visualized via the dashboard, enabling easy comparison of the individual production lines.
In addition, production quantities and reasons for stops, for example, are recorded and can be discussed in the shift dialog in order to bring about continuous improvements.
The sales department of the company was also benefiting from the solution, as the real-time data from production is used for internal price calculation.
Installed hardware
United Factorycube
IO-Link Gateway
Light Barriers
Vibration Sensors
Button Bar
Barcode Scanner
Production Manager Dashboard
The production manager and supervisor at a site can use their individual created dashboards to get an overview of production (e.g. overall equipment effectiveness, machine status and orders) and, if needed, can get more detailed information on each machine in the machine view.
Machine View
The machine view provides the user with a detailed insight into the selected machines. This allows, for example, the machine status but also stop reasons to be recorded at a single dashboard.
Cross-Factory Dashboard
The cross-plant dashboard is designed for management and makes it possible to compare different sites, machines and entire machine classes and to identify anomalies. The results can be exported to various formats (e.g. Excel) for further analysis.
More information?
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