Loss capturing, Overall Equipment Efficiency for Industry 4.0 ready factory
Case in Point: Food & Beverage company in INDIA
At a glance
Focus: Loss capturing, Overall Equipment Efficiency for Industry 4.0 ready factory
Challenge: One of the major challenges faced, especially by industries with thousands of product lines, is the cost of investment for a new line to cater to rising consumer demand. Legacy systems left machines working independently on the shop floor, and manual, non-real-time data collection meant operators couldn't accurately diagnose the causes of losses, breakdowns, and system stoppages.
Approach: After careful evaluation of various solutions, the factory — a renowned player in the Food & Beverage market — finalized the solution from B&R Industrial Automation, deploying the APROL PDA (Process Data Acquisition) platform to gather machine, process, production, and energy data from around 20 legacy machines on one line and calculate individual and overall line OEE.
Impact: If existing lines are optimized and monitored, the data generated enables factories to save significant costs — potentially producing the output of an eleventh line from the existing setup of ten, without added capital expenditure — while improving asset utilization, tracking bottlenecks, reducing waste of time/material/energy, and enabling real-time corrective action.
B&R Industrial Automation Pvt. Ltd.
B&R is an innovative automation company with headquarters in Austria and offices all around the world. On July 6, 2017, B&R became a business unit of the ABB Group. As a global leader in industrial automation, B&R combines state-of-the-art technology with advanced engineering to provide customers in virtually every industry with complete solutions for machine and factory automation, motion control, HMI and integrated safety technology. With Industrial IoT communication standards like OPC UA, POWERLINK and openSAFETY as well as the powerful Automation Studio software development environment, B&R is constantly redefining the future of automation engineering. The innovative spirit that keeps B&R at the forefront of industrial automation is driven by a commitment to simplifying processes and exceeding customer expectations.
Business challenge
One of the major challenges faced by especially those industries with thousands of product lines is the cost of investment of a new line in order to cater to the rising consumer demands. Also, legacy systems, make the factories work with individual machines, working independently on the shop floor. Another major challenge faced by factories is to identify losses occurring in the factory.
Usually the data collection needed for the upper layers is done by writing down the details from the machines including the production, quality and other details. This is then fed to a central location for analyzing. The major drawback of this approach is the data collected is not real-time and there are human errors while entering the data in the system. As the analysis is never real-time the factory operators are never able to diagnose the actual problem causing various losses, breakdown and systems stoppages.
Industry 4.0 solution
After careful evaluation of various solutions, the factory - a renowned player in the Food & Beverage market, finalized the solution from B&R Industrial Automation. The reason for implementing this application was to get a holistic view of the material losses, time losses and energy losses. These inputs were used to compare with the available labor utilized at the factory. The application helps calculate the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of individual machines and collating the data gathered helps calculate overall line efficiency.
B&R APROL PDA solution converts legacy machine data into actionable insights for faster, informed decisions.
Provides real-time visualization of machine, process, production, and energy data.
Combines process data acquisition, energy monitoring, and condition monitoring in one platform, removing the need for separate systems.
Runs on open-source Linux for lowest total cost of ownership, with integrated firewall for data security.
Connects ~20 machines per line via an Automation PC, storing data centrally with optional push to cloud/central server.
Offers customizable trends, charts, and user-based access control for each line and factory.
Key benefits
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Energy & Sustainability | If existing lines are optimized and monitored then the data generated enables factories to save on a lot of costs. To provide the impact in numbers, it could mean that if a factory has ten lines manufacturing different products and if these are monitored and optimized then it is possible for the factory to produce the production of the eleventh line from the existing setup of ten lines. Thus, saving huge expenses on the capital goods and providing effective production throughput. Asset utilization with optimization has been deployed to the fullest while implementing this application. Also by monitoring individual equipment efficiency & overall line efficiency can track the bottle neck & enable factory operators to act on the observed results to avoid wastage of time/ material / utilities (energy). Correction can be done online, which also improves on quality aspect. This generates a transparent performance picture that helps factories to focus on where to improve and deliver value to the business. This needs everyone to improve the way information is captured and used, in order to unlock trapped value and driving improvements, enabling factories to exceed performance targets. This application helps monitor the losses are from material, time, energy which can then be compared and correlated to labor. |
| Flexibility & Scalability | As all solutions from B&R are scalable from the point of view of hardware, software and technology. |