Is it possible to improve the productivity of a ceramic company by means of data analysis and digitalisation?
The combination of innovative production technologies, low cost, easy to use sensors, and monitoring and analysis tools enables companies to analyse and control complex challenges. Furthermore, the technologies available to us today allow us to increase margins by improving product quality and reducing production wastage.
At Ideas 4.0, we have applied these concepts in an area in which speed and product quality selection are key factors: the ceramic tile industry.
The business case of a continuous cycle ceramic manufacturing company, with one of the highest productivities in the industry (>= 90%), has been a stimulating study which led us to create innovative solutions to improve their productivity.
The first step was to analyse the performance of the plant, to identify opportunities for improving Overall Equipment Efficiency and reducing rejects.
Our analysis led us to identify 4 areas of interest, which we submitted to our client:
1. Improve the OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency)
200 minutes in 24 hours: this is the time the digital printing system employs in cleaning the print heads. An operation which is both lengthy and frequent. Our analysis of the process led us to design and create an automatic print head cleaning system. This automation has significantly reduced the frequency of cleaning cycles.
2. Reduce wastage
The ceramic production cycle includes end-of-line quality controls which distinguish between first quality, second quality and rejects.
We implemented an intelligent system located downline of the printing process, which controls the quality of the product prior to firing.
The solution developed by Ideas 4.0 is an automatic feedback loop with two components:
- sensors (vision system)
- manufacturing analytics
The loop detects deviations in the process and allows the operator to take action before the reject threshold is reached.
3. Supervise data
The partially manual machine OEE and reject data collection system had a number of gaps in its monitoring of the power consumption of the automated equipment.
The line supervisor proposed by Ideas 4.0 makes line data collection automatic and exhaustive, thus giving the operator proper information about the processes.
4. Benefits for production efficiency
The technological solutions we developed for our client, a continuous cycle ceramic tile manufacturer, resulted in improvements to their Overall Equipment Efficiency and productivity.
Ideas 4.0 calculates that the investments involved would pay for themselves in a year, and we assisted our client in preparing and submitting the documentation required to obtain the incentives envisaged in Italian Law 232 (“Industry 4.0”). Our solutions satisfy both the mandatory and optional conditions drawn up by the Tax Authorities in their bulletin dated 30 March 2017.
Technology as an instrument of change
Industry is going through an epochal transformation. The key factor in this is technology, especially in the following 4 areas:
– large amounts of data combined with advanced analytics
– the internet of things (IoT)
– automation/robotics
– artificial intelligence
These all add up to what is being called “the fourth industrial revolution”.
Ideas 4.0 develops innovative methodologies to exploit the technological characteristics of Industry 4.0 to significantly improve operating margins.