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