PRINTING AND PACKAGING COMPANIES ON THEIR WAY TO INDUSTRY 4.0
The evolution of industrial organizations towards Industry 4.0 or "smart factory" poses a set of challenges to the management. Within the modular structured smart factories, the CPS (cyber-physical system) interconnection assumes the creation and massive exchange of real-time data originating from the factory floor, gradually flowing to the decision makers. Data is the core of Industry 4.0. The large amount of data within the companies without treatment and analysis instead of being beneficial has no use at all. Before any decision is made the data needs effective transmission, cleaning, treatment, marshalling and storage.
The data collection implies the existence of a network infrastructure, and adequate data capture from the equipment (through its sensing). Taking into account the massive amount of data produced and exchanged, “Big Data” technologies are of fundamental importance. Nonetheless, generation, communication, and adequate replacement of organizational process data is only a necessary - but not sufficient - condition for value creation in Industry 4.0. In this sense, data should serve not only to create processes for decision-making autonomy throughout the value chain, gradually freeing employees and decision makers from the time-consuming tasks of decision-making that would require a great deal of time for analysis and consideration, but also for making predictions and optimal decisions accordingly, leading to resource savings and increased quality.
SISTRADE has the right tool to push your company to the fourth industrial revolution, optimizing, automating, and controlling your production line. One of Sistrade’s key applications is Manufacturing Execution System (MES), which delivers solutions to plan, collect data, supervise, and control the industrial process. SISTRADE offers a Smart Manufacturing solution that generate information for quick decision support, incrementing productivity.
Within the spectrum of shop floor data acquisition and processing one of the main solutions that SISTRADE offers is Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition – SCADA which is web-based software, automatically retrieving data from operators, machine sensors, PLCs (Programmable logic controllers) and various devices within a plant. SCADA has the ability to present a 3D plant of all machines, operators, and processes in real time, allowing to reduce unproductive time.
It is important to understand why automatic data collection is beneficial to the companies. Among the major benefits we recognize the increased data reliability as the human intervention is minimizes thus also minimizing the possibility of an error. Companies also fain a better control of the machine speed and have reliable data record regarding the downtimes on the shop floor.
How can companies achieve their goal of cutting on costs and increasing profits as well as reducing waste if you analyse the production information from the past, basing your decision on the information that is off-dated? More often than not, guarantee a good control the managers need the correct information here and now. The automatic data acquisition allows the production management related decisions to have a solid base on the latest, up-to-date data, coming directly from the machines and operators which assures the maximum efficiency of production.
With automatic data acquisition system at hand, you can retrieve data on the machine status, instantaneous and average speed, you know the setup and production time as well as the consumed material and production quantities. To secure an effective asset maintenance and timely deliveries the information regarding the downtimes is provided. The access to all this information in real time, not only contributes to a greater industrial performance but also makes quality control much easier to monitor supporting your company’s commitment to meeting the highest quality standards.
The main purpose of of our solution is to reduce human intervention in production data records while at the same time significantly improving data reliability. The data acquisition from the shop floor can be done by the use of proprietary acquisition cards as well as standard PLC (e.g. Omron or Siemens), we also use standards protocols such as OPC server or XML and relational database – SQL Server. There are different platforms that can be implemented as the requirements of each project.
What can give you a better comprehension of how your company can improve with the help of such system than a real example of Sistrade system solution already implemented in the company on printing and packaging market? Therefore, we bring a case study describing a “Conveyor” project implementation. This framework of this project consists of the installation of three conveyor belts between the shop floor and the warehouse. The production area prepares the pallet to be sent to the warehouse and the operator places each pallet on the belt, afterwards, the system reads the barcode of the pallet and makes the automatic transfer to the warehouse. All this transfer process grants greater reliability, where the each pallet can be monitored through the screens, knowing the reference and the exact location. There is no human intervention which decreases the possibility of errors.
2021-12-14 Tuesday