Capture: the dual power of energy and production monitoring

About

Company
Petersime
Location
Zulte, Belgium
Competences

OEE

production excellence

productie optimalisatie

data analytics

industry 4.0

industrial IoT

energy monitoring

industry 4.0 - incubators and hatcheries

1. The Big Picture

  • World leader in incubation:
    • Petersime is known worldwide as a leading player in incubation technology. Their focus is on designing, manufacturing and delivering innovative solutions for hatcheries and incubators, including in-house developed trays, baskets, and trolleys. To map and improve the production performance of these trolleys, Petersime approached Vintecc.

2. The challenge - bringing production and technology together

  • Need for monitoring:
    • Petersime trolley making is done on a dedicated production line divided into four main workstations. At each workstation, the trolley takes more shape to a final finished product. Monitoring these workstations ultimately proved decisive in accurately mapping productivity and identifying potential operational improvements.
  • Counting trolleys:
    • Not the operator's actions themselves but rather the throughput of carts per workstation proved necessary. By mapping how many carts were at each workstation, it was possible to predict throughput to the next station, identify bottlenecks and explore operational improvements. Existing hardware was looked at to map the throughput of the workstations.

3. The solution - make use of existing hardware infrastructure

  • Energy and counting combined:
    • Vintecc proposed a pragmatic solution using existing energy sensors. These sensors - originally intended for energy monitoring - were creatively used to indirectly count the number of trolleys produced. Each energy spike meant that there was an action or operation, and thus that the trolley was being worked on. So by counting the fairly constant energy spikes, we indirectly mapped the production performance of the workstations.
  • Capture as an IoT-Platform:
    • Centralising energy monitoring of the production line in Capture, Vintecc's industrial IoT platform, created a smart solution for production counting. This approach resulted in significant cost savings and reduced complexity as no new systems had to be set up alongside the existing infrastructure.

4. The results

  • Real-time insight:
    • Thanks to Capture, Petersime now has real-time insight into the performance of each individual workstation and the entire production line. The production data now allows Petersime to further optimise.
  • Cost savings:
    • Capture's total solution and multi-deployability as an IoT platform not only proved more cost-efficient than separate systems, but also simplified everything.
  • Dashboard functionality:
    • Capture provides dedicated dashboards for both energy monitoring and production tracking. These dashboards, simple and flexible, enable Petersime to manage and optimise their production processes.