Customer success story: The Packaging Place

The Packaging Place, a leading provider of packaging solutions, faced a critical challenge in optimising their manufacturing operations. Like many companies in their industry, they were grappling with disparate legacy operational control systems that provided basic management and reporting functionality, making it impossible to gain a holistic view of their processes. To add to this some of the machines control systems were “locked down” while others had little to no control system at all. This fragmentation led to a loss of efficiency and suboptimal operating outcomes.

Requirements

The Packaging Place needed a solution that could:

• Provide real-time visibility into machine performance, including throughput, uptime,
  and efficiency.
• Track energy usage patterns by machine across the facility and forecast expected costs.
• Costly rework resulting from late error detection
• Consolidate data from multiple machines into a single, unified view for better decision-making.

As The Packaging Place’s custom packaging products are in high demand, the solution proposed needed to achieve these improvements without significant disruption to production activities.

CapitalAI Solution

The CapitalAI team consulted with the client to understand the important monitoring and control requirements and reportable metrics and implementation options:

• Seamless Data Acquisition: Additional micro-PLCs and sensors were installed to compliment the current PLC’s on three critical machines at the facility. An Ewon industrial gateway was deployed to securely and reliably pass the data between the machines and the NexAI platform enabling real-time data collection.
• Real-time Monitoring and Dashboards: Data collected by the NexAI platform was transformed into insightful visualisations for Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and Energy Consumption, providing a real-time view of KPI’s such as:
  – Manufactured Throughput
  – Uptime and Downtime
  – Effectiveness and Performance
  – Energy Consumption and Cost

You can view the entire solution and the results here.