“Most of our electricity consumption comes from our machines running. They even monitor where water pipes come into the factory, sensing for steady vibrations or leaks to address. IoT devices measure temperature, humidity, and machine voltage. When the power consumption reaches a certain threshold, a ticket in the maintenance department is automatically created so they can add more lubrication and avoid potential downtime.” “When you look at this data, you can see when the drive chain has a challenging time moving and requires more power. “We installed IoT sensors that read the consumption of the motor on the drive chain,” Baldassari continues. It requires a drive chain to move components through the heat zones, and the drive chain needs lubrication to work properly,“ Baldassari says. It’s a long piece of equipment that contains heat chambers where reflow and soldering happen. Baldassari says that most of the plant’s equipment uses sensors to capture data to feed into an advanced analytics platform. More than 500 IIoT devices currently operate at the plant, with more added regularly. The IIoT web at Althofen is almost everywhere behind the scenes, quietly gathering data to inform operational improvements.įlex began rethinking Althofen plant operations in 2016 and started with a massive IoT project in late 2017. Thanks to those efforts and their impressive results, in September 2021, the World Economic Forum admitted the Althofen plant into the Global Lighthouse Network, a who’s who list of factories that demonstrate the best of what Industry 4.0 can accomplish. And that's where we started in Althofen to think differently.” We needed to do something that is a step function in efficiency. “We have to do that roughly with the same number of people. Meaning we placed 10% more components, and mostly this ends up in 10% more end product as well,” says Paul Baldassari, executive vice president at Flex. “In Althofen we do about 10% more complexity, I would say, every year. This still wasn't enough for the plant to keep up with long-term growth targets. The plant also ran enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Global manufacturing, supply chain, and solutions partner Flex’s plant in Althofen, Austria, manufactures more than 500 medical, industrial and automotive products including drug delivery devices, fleet management systems, GPS modules, and precision measuring solutions.įlex began digitization efforts at the Althofen plant in 2010 and by 2016 amply demonstrated its friendliness to Industry 4.0 technologies, including cobots and automated guided vehicles (AGVs). Are exemplar smart factories better-called genius factories?
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