Piramal Glass unbottles smart manufacturing with Azure IoT and Microsoft AI
Case in point: Piramal Glass
At a glance
Piramal Glass provides glass packaging for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and perfumery, and the specialty food and beverage industries. Through continued value addition, superior quality, and unmatched customer service, the company plans to become the world’s preferred supplier of glass packaging solutions with Microsoft Azure and AI solutions.
In the era of digital transformation, adopting a new generation of technologies is imperative. In manufacturing, the competitive landscape and business models are changing at a rapid pace, and leaders are embracing digital-first strategies to stay ahead.
With end-to-end solutions in over 50 countries, offices and warehousing facilities in France, Germany, US, Brazil, India, UAE, United Kingdom, China, and Sri Lanka, Piramal Glass designs, produces, and decorates premium glass packaging material.
“Glass manufacturing is a complex industry with fixed costs and capacities that are therefore very sensitive to variations in demand. It was vital to optimize the operations to drive profitable growth and it was evident that Industry 4.0 was one of the key levers to achieve this,” says Vijay Shah, Director at Piramal Glass and Executive Director at Piramal Enterprises Ltd.
Business challenge
Piramal Glass produces 1,375 tons of glass units per day across 60 production lines, all of which run on a 24/7 basis. Glass manufacturing involves various phases such as batch preparation, melting the raw materials in the furnace, bottle forming, treatments, various quality checks and packaging. In a single day, Piramal Glass produces dozens of bottle varieties across its production lines.
Glass containers are produced in a continuous manufacturing process which is very complex because of the numerous parameters that could impact quality. If the production lot witnesses higher rejections during quality control, they would usually be rectified in the next lot, resulting in production losses.
In addition, the data was manually collected for each lot. Plant personnel would capture the data in paper-based logbooks, which proved difficult to analyze and did not provide timely insights to improve production. As a result, Piramal Glass was planning to improve production efficiency and minimize defects to transform its manufacturing process with technology.
“Our vision is to become an insights-driven organization, where every employee can combine tradecraft and science in each bottle we make. Ultimately, we foresee the use of the digital technologies to be fundamental in our journey towards Industry 4.0,” says Poorav Sheth, Chief Digital Officer at Piramal Glass.
Industry 4.0 solution
An early adopter of technology, Piramal Glass decided to digitally transform its manufacturing operations by partnering with Microsoft for its Azure IoT platform. Piramal Glass took advantage of IoT to get real-time visibility into its manufacturing operations and analyze the defects at various stages. To facilitate this transformation, Websym, a Microsoft partner, brought in its plant monitoring system hosted on Microsoft Azure. Using Azure IoT Hub, data from equipment and high-speed production line sensors is pushed to the cloud for further analysis.
The first of its kind, a custom solution, Real Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI), was developed on top of this platform to provide stage-wise losses, production reports, and quality control workflows, as well as role-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) on the personal computers and smartphones of plant personnel. Actionable alerts are sent through SMS, email, and push notifications whenever there is an anomaly detected or a drop in production efficiency.
“On one hand, Microsoft Azure is continuing to emerge as the most sought-after cloud platform that’s allowing us to build cutting-edge solutions, bridging the value of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge coming together. On the other hand, we’re really enthused by the vision of Piramal Glass to transform traditional processes in the digital-first world,” says Ashish Nene, CEO at Websym.
RTMI was piloted in three production lines in the Kosamba plant near Surat, Gujarat. Existing and retrofitted sensors were connected to the cloud with Azure IoT Hub and analyzed through RTMI. Since the benefits were evident early on, RTMI was scaled to 46 production lines across Piramal Glass plants in India, Sri Lanka, and the US, within a period of only six months.
This move eliminated paper logbooks, and data collection and analysis started happening in real time, with dashboards accessible on laptops, smartphones, and other devices. Plant personnel had easy access to production and defect metrics, quality control workflows, and role-specific KPIs. Alerts regarding production anomalies were immediately received through SMS, email, and push notifications. and the required corrective actions were taken immediately.
“We were impressed with the platform approach Microsoft has taken with Azure IoT and the industrial automation experience Websym brought to the table. We worked as a team where they also guided us on the kind of sensors and gateway devices we should use,” Sheth explains.
Currently, Piramal Glass is implementing AI and machine learning models using the Microsoft Cognitive Services platform to address the issues of anomaly detection, production efficiency, defect causality, and product quality for every production lot. The company is creating a unified view of all of its equipment and processes to create a digital twin of the manufacturing plant.
Key benefits
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Visibility & Analytics | To date, Piramal Glass has analyzed over 200 million data points from the 4,000 sensors connected across its production units. The solution has enhanced the efficiency of plant managers in detecting anomalies in the process, monitoring key performance metrics, and making informed decisions in real time. |
| Quality | RTMI has also reduced manual data gathering by 40 percent, resulting in a 25-percent improvement in employee productivity. The real-time feedback loop has led to a 1-percent improvement in production efficiency and 5-percent reduction in defects, which translates into better quality and enhanced predictability of delivery timelines for its customers. |