Hirotec America is part of the Hirotec Group of Companies, a $1.6 billion corporation with over 60 years of mass production experience and engineering discipline. With 26 facilities in nine countries around the world, the Group is globally recognised as a premier automation manufacturing equipment and parts supplier.
For over 50 years, top vehicle producers like General Motors and Mazda have used Hirotec’s proven, high-quality industrial manufacturing concepts and systems. The parts and tooling supplier designs and builds roughly 7 million doors and 1,5 million exhaust systems a year, making it one of the largest private production companies in today’s global automotive market.
The challenge
Operational downtime is a significant issue facing OEMs. In most cases, the machinery involved runs without condition-based monitoring, essentially operating until a failure occurs. At that time, appropriate personnel are contacted to assess the situation and make the repairs as expeditiously as possible to prevent dramatically delaying production schedules.
Hirotec sought to eliminate this trend of reactive maintenance and lost opportunities by utilising the information and systems it had on hand to gain deeper insight into its operations and processes. The automotive supplier had long collected industrial data from sensors and machines across customer production facilities and its own systems to support its decisions and track business progress.
However, volumes of this data were manually separated and stored across multiple sources, making it inaccessible to systematic analysis. In order to improve quality, reduce downtime, and optimise production schedules, Hirotec needed to implement a modern, automated solution that could gather maintenance and operational information into one source and offer actionable recommendations to its quality control professionals.
“A lack of data was never an issue for us,” said senior Hirotec researcher Justin Hester. “As one of the largest automotive manufacturing suppliers in the world, we collect volumes of datasets on a daily basis. The problem we were faced with was transitioning from a data-heavy organisation to a data-smart organisation. We realised that in order to bolster profits from untapped machine generated information, we needed to look towards modern solutions that automated the process and enabled timely, data driven decisions.
The approach
Recognising the need for connectivity, data access, and scalability, executives at Hirotec worked to develop a competitive strategy to capitalise on the potential benefits of the IIoT. The initiative began with identifying the fundamental technologies that would fuel the IoT effort.
After evaluating several traditional IoT offerings from industrial automation vendors, the executives found that many solutions were restricted to a single business aspect, protocol or standard. Not wanting to waste time and effort integrating multiple solutions across several business functions, they finally turned to the ThingWorx IoT Platform and Kepware’s KEPServerEX – both solutions from PTC – to enable company-wide device-to-cloud connectivity through one overarching toolset. Working together to deploy a single source of smart solutions for the IoT, the ThingWorx platform would be able to provide analytical insight through the company data streamed from the IoT Gateway for KEPServerEX, an advanced plug-in capable of pushing information from KEPServerEX into Big Data and analytic software applications.
To support the company’s long-term IoT vision, Hirotec collaborated with representatives at PTC to build an IoT framework supported by short, six-week agile sprints. Where a full IoT implementation may have taken years to generate a proof of concept, the Scrum model provided company executives with visible and quantifiable progress in just weeks.
Hirotec’s North American shop in Detroit was chosen as the test bed for the first small sprint because of the unique data types generated among its eight Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines. ThingWorx IoT Platform provides analytics and the ability to develop role-based applications for data visualisations, where the Kepware’s IoT Gateway for KEPServerEX collects data from the CNC machines and streams it in real-time to the cloud. This solution gives Hirotec labour-free access to a customised visualisation of both the operations and conditions of its industrial devices and systems.
The results
Since implementing the ThingWorx IoT Platform and Kepware’s IoT Gateway, Hirtotec has gained increased visibility into the processes of its CNC shop and deeper insight into operations. The company realised early on that having access to CNC machine uptime data significantly impacted the shop’s scheduling process, which was previously set on conjecture and after-the-fact analysis. Manufacturing leadership can now leverage real-time data from the shop floor and tie it to the scheduling ERP system, optimising the scheduling of parts to CNC modules.
“In just six weeks, we’ve gained more visibility into our operations than ever before, reinforcing our investment and belief in the power of the IoT,” said Hester. “With data-centric knowledge generated from ThingWorx and KEPServerEX, we can now make smarter and timelier decisions that not only impact our CNC shop, but also help us identify how we can operate more efficiently and profitably across all of our facilities.”
For more information contact Duan Gauche, 1Worx, +27 (0)12 654 0056, duan@1worx.co, www.1worx.co
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