Industrial

Specialized Plastics Supplier

Driving Cost Savings in the Quality Control of Plastic Extrusion Processes with IIoT , Machine Learning and Microsoft Azure

 

Situation

Background

  • IT consulting partner for Softing in Microsoft Azure projects
  • End customer produces and distributes specialized plastics
  • 5 production sites worldwide. Each site operates 2-6 plastic extruders
  • Extrusion samples are analyzed every two hours for quality control purposes, representing a significant production cost

Business need

  • Introduce data analytics in the process to reduce the number of required extrusion sample and production costs
  • Implementation requires to collect and visualize data and apply machine learning strategies to generate insights and ensure quality of the produced plastic

Technical Requirements

  • Option for cloud based strategy, to minimize upfront investment, start small and scale fast
  • Heterogenous pool of shop floor controllers including Siemens PLCs, OPC Servers and Modbus TCP compatible machines
Softing Industrial case study: Specialized plastics supplier
 

Solution

  • dataFEED OPC Suite to collect data from multiple Siemens PLCs, OPC servers and Modbus TCP
  • Seamless integration with IoT Azure Hub (cloud) over MQTT
  • Data analytics, visualization and machine learning on the Azure cloud
 

Benefits

  • Robust, secure and versatile OPC Suite
  • Wide variety of PLCs and protocols supported
  • Seamless and easy to deploy integration with IoT Azure Hub