Client Profile.
A reputed food processing company involved in processing, manufacturing and trading of raw pulses. The plant machinery such as bucket elevator, blower, de-stoner, gravity separator, dryer and color sorting played a critical role in managing the entire production cycle- right from processing raw materials to final packaging.
Business Need.
The food processing unit is semi-automatic with a series of sequential operations. Very often, faults are detected only after machine breakdown and huge production losses. The company was looking for an automated solution to:
- Remotely monitor condition of heavy duty machines
- Identify faults in real time
- Take preventive and timely action
The objective was to achieve higher machine uptime, minimal production losses and ensure workforce safety.
Challenges.
- Conventional nature of machines does not offer any predictability in terms of their operations and maintenance.
- Reliance on preventive maintenance and ability to act only after breakdowns.
- Heavy duty electrical motors-driven machines create heavy noise and vibrations that hamper the monitoring process and worker safety.
Solution.
The HitechDigital team’s remote condition monitoring solution for critical assets included:
- Installation of sensors for vibration, temperature, power consumption and air pressure to enable continued monitoring of all required operations
- Deployment of an IoT-enabled gateway to monitor machine health parameters
- Creation of an intuitive dashboard to generate real time insights into operations and status of spare and parts
- Setting up of mechanism to send out automated alerts and notifications to all stakeholders
Approach.
- Initial round of discussions to understand client’s maintenance related problems, breakdown history with probable reasons and causes, details of machine models and more.
- Installation of IoT gateway devices along with necessary sensors and online monitoring platform.
- Development of online monitoring dashboard for insights and to track relevant KPIs.
- Setting up of an intelligent early warning system providing timely alerts and notifications for various machine-related threshold parameters.
Business Impact.
The gains following regular tracking and monitoring of multiple machine health parameters include:
Real-time visibility across operations and asset performance for effective decision making.
Prevention of unnecessary machine breakdown and increase of machine uptime.
Reduction of maintenance and production costs.
Optimization of inventory management for spares and other machine consumables.
