Industrial Intelligence

Case Study

Small Wire and Cable Solutions Manufacturer

Reallocate Machine Attendant

PRoblem

Company is a mid-size OEM of compressors and welding/cutting equipment.

Company was focusing on growth and the need to continually evolve its business and stay relevant. They embarked on a Digital Transformation journey with a focus on Internet of Things (IoT).

Previous efforts by the company required years working on developing in-house systems. They hoped to not repeat that situation.

Many products with long service life posed challenges for IoT-readiness and deployment.

Small manufacturer wire cutting/stripping machine.

Solution

PTC ThingWorx and Microsoft Azure IoT used to conduct several pilot projects across business units focused on adding value to the core products.

PTC ThingWorx was implemented to integrate with multiple business units, maintain centralized data sharing, and enable flexible solutions across many customers.

Capabilities used in the solution included predictive and prescriptive analytics used with alerts and notifications to provide advance warnings of potential failures of compressors in the field.

Results

Unplanned downtime has been reduced significantly, increasing asset utilization and revenue from that cell. Data is also available in the Industrial IoT platform for trending and analysis to understand the behaviors of the machine and the operator for improvements.

One of the more exciting results from the solution was that the full-time attendant to the machine can now spend 75%+ of their time performing other, more value-added tasks. That’s like hiring a new operator for free.

Our Client’s Results

Our open technology approach combined with a structured Unified Namespace, focus on solving the business challenges first, and more value through less complexity has helped our customers achieve great success. The result is real-time visibility for solving many plant challenges using a scalable and flexible solution. Clients often achieve 30-50% improvement in OEE within the first 6 months with our solutions, and the long-term value of the data in their company is priceless.