Littelfuse chooses Cantier as the strategic partner on their Industry 4.0 Transformation Journey
Case in point: Littelfuse
At a glance
Focus: Littelfuse chooses Cantier as the strategic partner on their Industry 4.0 Transformation Journey
Challenge: Littelfuse wanted to embark on an Industry 4.0 transformation journey across multiple plants, but faced old equipment and manual processes that inhibited problem analysis — leading to weak bottom-line performance, root cause analysis taking over a week, and poor OEE, MTBF, MTBA, and MTTR, compounded by limited CAPEX budgets and old machines with PLC interfaces like Allen Bradley and GE Fanuc.
Approach: As step one, Cantier studied the current manufacturing process and created a plan in consultation with Littelfuse on prioritized areas for change, then identified equipment to connect and firmed up the technology for data collection, processing, and visualization — starting with a pilot POC in a Philippines factory before scaling to full rollouts.
Impact: In one of the factories making electronic products, Littelfuse connected 127 machines with Cantier MES 4.0 and SCADA solutions using the OPC UA standard through an IIoT gateway — including machines over 40 years old — achieving a 17% MTTR improvement, 15% MTBF improvement, 10% overall productivity improvement, and 7% OEE improvement.
Cantier System
Founded in 2010 with Head Office in Singapore, Cantier System provides Manufacturing Execution Solutions (MES) to enable Smart Manufacturing/Industry 4.0 practices in every market that they serve. Cantier’s solutions improve Shop-floor Traceability, Visibility, Quality, and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) leading to Real-time flow of accurate information towards Data-driven decisions with a high focus on product upgrades towards Predictive Analytics with built in Machine Learning and AR/VR.
To learn more, please visit: https://www.cantier.com/
Littelfuse
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and founded in 1927, Littelfuse is a global industrial technology manufacturing company spread across more than 15 countries, to design and deliver innovative, reliable solutions to over 100,000 end customers, in a variety of industrial, transportation, and electronics end markets.
Business challenge
Littelfuse wanted to embark on Industry 4.0 transformation journey across multiple plants. However, they faced challenges with old equipment and many manual processes that inhibited their ability to analyze problems. All these factors lead to weak bottom-line performance with longer time for the Root Cause Analysis ( 1 Week) and poor OEE, MTBF, MTBA and MTTR.
As a corporate strategy Littelfuse wanted to implement standardized Industry 4.0 solution roll out with minimal capex investments across multiple factories having old machines with PLC interfaces such as Allen Bradly, GE Fanuc and Industrial PCs.
Littelfuse had to carry out transformation with limited CAPEX budgets and many old machines to connect.
Industry 4.0 solution
As a step one, Cantier studied the current manufacturing process and created a plan in consultation with Littelfuse on prioritized areas for change.
As the next step the equipment to be connected were identified and the technology for data collection, processing and visualization were firmed up.
Finally a pilot was carried out to demonstrate a scope and then enable multiple roll outs for replication.
Connecting with the key stakeholders to define the scope for change
Establish the charter and the team for implementation
Submitting the proposal
Obtaining the approval for implementation
In 2019, Liitelfuse chose Cantier as their Industry 4.0 Implementation partner after a successful Proof Of Concept (POC) implementation at one of their Philippines factories.
Initially, 8 machines were connected, and the POC was focused only on real-time OEE and Machine Status monitoring. This led to faster response and improved recovery time after machine failure. The productivity increased by 15% in 4 weeks.
This POC created an opportunity for a factory wide implementation of Cantier MES 4.0 in plants making electronic & semiconductor units.
Key benefits
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Operational Benefit | In one of the factories making electronic products, we have connected 127 machines with Caniter MES 4.0 and SCADA Solutions using OPC UA Standard through the IIoT Gateway. Many of the machines were having Allen Bradly, GE Fanuc PLC based interfaces and Industrial PCs. We were able to connect even some of the machines that are 40+ years old. |
| Visibility & Analytics | Phase 1: Digital Workstation. To digitalize the existing paper-based process, Arcstone deployed our digital workstation module to each location. Users are able to access their systems on a portable tablet anywhere in the factory. The portability and familiarity of mobile devices also smoothened the transition to the workstation. This reduced back-and-forth movement of technicians who now only needed to input data once into an overall system. |
| Traceability & Compliance | Phase 2: Integration and Reporting. Arcstone integrated our solution with the client’s existing MES to consolidate machinery data, create custom reports and visualization tools. Customizable dashboards featured on the digital workstation to allow for real-time traceability to insights that were not readily available previously. |
| Downtime & Reliability | 17% MTTR improvement. |
| Operational Benefit | P15% MTBF improvement. |
| Productivity & Throughput | 10% Overall Productivity Improvement. |
| Productivity & Throughput | 7% OEE improvement. |
Technologies used
Change management and implementation
Old equipment (45 years +) needs to be studied and to understand the current interfacing challenges and identify effective approach to bring them mainstream.
Multiple protocols from different vendors had to be interfaced with Cantier IIOT framework
Detailed planning from SMEs and testing in Cantier labs before implementation with simulators helped to avoid failures.
What they said
"We had a very good experience with Cantier on MES 4.0 and SCADA implementation in our facility in Lipa, Philippines. Some of our machines are as old as 45 years old and we thought it is pretty difficult to connect them to get the live data but Cantier team has proved us wrong by bringing in the experts from other parts of the world and solved the problem with negligible cost. I would say Cantier team is well equipped both in hardware and software knowledge. On top of the knowledge they possess they also demonstrated good “Customer First” attitude and supported us for few months after the installation of MES 4.0. I would say the response time was as quick as few minutes. They have been very accommodative to our requests for minor changes in the system or reporting structure etc.We have seen improvements in our OEE and MTTR after 3 months of installation. We have seen 7% improvement in our backend equipment OEE and 17% improvement in MTTR. We have seen at least 15% reduction in downtimes in the front end equipment. Overall it has been a very positive experience"