Industrial

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

 

Situation

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
 

Solution

  • 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)
 

Benefits

  • 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
x

Softing Inc.

«