IIoT based Predictive Maintenance Solution
Case in point: OMRON IIoT
At a glance
India is the largest producer, consumer and exporter of coffee in the world today, contributing about 48 per cent of the worlds requirement of coffee. As the global demand for coffee is spurring up, it is also throwing up challenges. One of them is maintaining the sustainability of the coffee. Because coffee is a delicate product that can be damaged by high temperature and extreme processing, special care should be taken to ensure products are of top quality.
OMRON AUTOMATION
Headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, OMRON Corporation is a multi-billion-dollar, diversified company with business units producing industrial automation products, electronic components, and healthcare equipment and ticketing systems. OMRON Industrial Automation is a global leader providing complete automation solutions for industrial applications. It brings innovation to manufacturing sites through automation with "Integrated”, "intelligent" and "interactive" concepts with one of the world’s most sophisticated Input-Logic-Output-Robotics + Safety (ILOR+S) technology including the proprietary sensing technology.
OMRON Automation – India, now more than two decades old in the country, caters to over 7 industrial applications encompassing the wide requirements of packaging, automotive, material handling, solar, food & beverages, textile and panel building applications. The company is focusing on the solution business, including Robotics and IIoT, providing “One Stop” solutions, to improve the overall efficiency on diverse production sites. Focusing on the themes of quality, safety and the environment, they support manufacturing innovation worldwide with their unique sensing & controlling technologies. OMRON is rapidly expanding its operations with focus on all major cities making its presence felt across the country with a strong network of offices, automation centre, training centres, sales & marketing force, application teams, resident engineers and channel partners to address the ever challenging requirements of the customers. A major factor in OMRON’s progress globally & locally has been the strong commitment towards its customers keeping ‘Quality First’.
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OMRON IIoT
The unit is engaged in the manufacturing of medicines, mineral & herbal products and is counted as one of the fastest growing FMCG companies in India.
Business challenge
The Coffee manufacturer had suffered huge production loss due to sudden stoppage or unplanned breakdowns. The end user had to maintain huge inventory of utility motors and manpower had to be kept on standby to cater to the sudden break down. Besides there was a pressure to raise the productivity owing to the rising market demand. Lab reports and other mission-critical details like temperature and pressure settings were all manual entries, indicating a strong need to digitize the same.
Multiple processes: There were several motors for dry and wet processes which were critical to ensure continuity in production.
Dependency on manual inspection: Only manual inspection was done for motors, where in one electrician took manual log of all the motor parameters.
No solution to analyze the health of motors: There was no solution in place to monitor of motor performance and energy consumption to analyze the deterioration of motor health in real time.
Heavy Production loss:Due to sudden stoppage of critical utility motors. Motor failure was damaging equipment as well.
Industry 4.0 solution
Owing to the emerging trends in the manufacturing industry, primarily Industry 4.0, this leading coffee Manufacturer was looking for a solution that would help it in continuously monitoring their mission-critical equipment across the plant and provide real-time information regarding the machine health, variations in equipment parameters like pressure and temperature settings etc., and maintain top quality in their processes and products. The demand for lean and efficient processes with high quality as well as high productivity levels asks for mistake-proof operations and hence this Coffee Manufacturer wanted to digitize, automate and improvise all their existing processes.
Omron partnered with Prusight Solutions - a leading Industry 4.0 solution provider - and proposed a solution that could facilitate remote monitoring of equipment, reduce maintenance cost and reduce unplanned downtimes by detecting abnormalities in real time.
The overall turnkey solution was realized using OMRON’s IIoT capable devices like K6CM – the real-time motor condition monitoring device and NX102 - a compact PLC, capable of seamless integratng with both field and IT layer.
The real time equipment parameters like vibration, temperature and current are captured by K6CM and communicated to NX102 on Ethernet IP which are polled to the server using NX102’s built in database connectivity option eliminating the requirement of a middleware.
The data from the server is then captured and visualized using interactive dashboard developed by Prusight Solution.
OMRON’s predictive maintenance solution integrated with Prusight’s capabilities allowed the systems to predict when exactly the equipment might breakdown and sends alerts to the respective teams for corrective measures well within the time frame.
Lab reports and other mission-critical details like temperature and pressure settings are all digitized to avoid any manual entry in the system, thus reducing errors to virtually zero.
Key benefits
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Operational Benefit | The benefits of OMRONs industrial IIOT automation solutions provided with Prusight were measurable within just two weeks of implementation, supporting the plant processes involved in coffee production. |
| Operational Benefit | Reduction in error rate :Having implemented the solutions, a reduction of the error rate from 5% to nearly zero has been achieved and the intertwined operations are unraveled. |
| Cost Savings | Overall productivity increased :by 32% with the data integration from OMRON system linked to Prusights inventory management processes. |
| Cost Savings | Production costs reduced : by 43%, with more predictable inventory requirements. |
| Visibility & Analytics | Error rate reduced close to zero : with 46% increase in efficiency owing to digitally optimized processes and data capture. |
Technologies used
Change management and implementation
The major challenges that were faced foreseen before implementation of the project were:
Limited networking option available in the existing machinery.
Modelling the predictive algorithm to detect abnormalities.
The risks were mitigated by:
conducting extensive trials to successfully establish connectivity on the existing machinery.
data analytics on the captured data to arrive at the predictive model.
The solution implementation was done in phases:
Phase 1:Data was pooled from the existing machines and modelled in parallel to the manual data record in place
Phase 2:Operators were trained to access the dashboard and export data records and reports.
The human effort to access the critical machinery distributed across plant area was reduced. Manual data recording process was eliminated reducing effort and errors in data.