Food Manufacturing

08/17/2018

vluc

CaseStudy

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The initial pain point for the client was that a line would go down, but nobody would know about it for 30-60 minutes. A line going down meant the machines all appeared to operate as expected, but no product was being produced. While someone on the floor would eventually notice and take action, the client needed to be immediately alerted of any operational issues.

During our initial conversations, the client determined how much money was lost and was shocked to see they were losing 10’s of thousands of dollars per day.

Business Challenge

Lines frequently ‘went down’ for a food production client. With numerous production lines operating simultaneously, employees on the floor were unable to detect when the lines had issues. This resulted in lengthy periods of time where end product was not produced and leadership scrambling for answers.

Solution

Many IoT vendors offer insights, alerts, and analytics. However, the client had integrated IoT solutions from many vendors and the different vendors did not speak the same language. As a result, the client did not have a singular view of their overall operating environment.

Our recommended solution was for the client to add our custom module to each of their gateways connecting them via MQTT to our IoT platform. This allowed the gateways from each vendor to publish data to our MQTT broker, thus, giving a central location for all of their IoT data.

We were able to monitor all IoT data as it was being collected and identify any red flags that could cause a line to go down. Once an issue was identified, out IoT platform could immediately notify the floor manager to take action.

Once the client saw that we were able to collect all of the data from the various IoT platforms into a central location, they were excited to explore additional solutions to some of their other business challenges. Another challenge was visibility of their overall operating environment.

Together, we decided to display critical data on large TV screens throughout the factory floor. To stream the data to the displays, we created APIs into our IoT platform data storage. Our platform analyzed the data and displayed visual updates in real-time.

Benefits

The client identified the following benefits:

  • Floor managers immediately notified when a line went down
  • Large screen TVs allowed everyone to have clear visibility to the current operational environment including:
    • Temperatures of each environment
    • Production level of each shift
    • Operational status of each line
  • Predictive analytics identified when production would slow down

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Post by Vincent Luc

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