Machine Builder Food and Beverages
Connecting 25+ Productions Sites to Central IoT Platform, Process Optimization and Downtime Reduction for CNC Machines and Monitoring of Energy Consumption
Background
- Large system suppliers to the food, beverage & pharmaceutical industries
- Customer is using more than 400 CNC machines in 25+ production sites
- IoT project to connect all production sites to central IoT platform and multiple applications
Business need
- Improve the operational processes to increase OEE
- Enable real-time monitoring of machine tools, reduce idle times
- Machine data shall be available for MES, SAP and IoT applications
- Customers uses CNC machines from different vendors, mostly Siemens
- Open, modular and CNC vendor independent architecture
- Compliance with IT Security and data governance requirements
Technical Requirements
- Connect Siemens Sinumerik 840D solution line with software version V2.7 and higher and Siemens Sinumerik 840D power line with software version V7.4 and higher
- Applications require access to NC and PLC data
- Transfer machine data to Microsoft Azure cloud platform
- Azure IoT Edge runtime on edge level, deploy machine connectivity as Docker container
- Customer selected Softing Industrial as supplier for machine connectivity, uses edgeConnector 840D, pre installed on 3rd party IPC (Kontron)
- Initial roll out in five locations; 70 machines are connected; seven IIoT use cases implemented, including monitoring of the remaining runtime of NC programs, and monitoring of energy consumption
- Planned: roll out to all production sites, connecting more than 350 machines, and implementation of additional IoT use cases (3-4 years)
- Transparency and benchmarking on machine usage
- Process improvements to increase OEE
- Deploy machine connectivity once, use across multiple applications
- Modular architecture for edge, based on container technology, offering investment protection
- Single first level support interface for edge device, reduced efforts for initial installation
