Piramal Glass has deployed Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform to transform its manufacturing operations.
Piramal Glass has currently implemented the solution, Real-Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI), on 46 production lines across their four plants at Kosamba and Jambusar in Gujarat, India, Sri Lanka and the US.
Piramal Glass, which has plants with a capacity of 1375 tons per day, with 12 furnaces and 60 production lines, has leveraged IoT to get real-time visibility into its line manufacturing operations and to analyze production line losses at various stages.
Piramal Glass used Microsoft’s Azure IoT Hub to acquire data from sensors on production lines to identify quality parameters at each stage and get insights on line efficiencies in real-time. This resulted in improved production efficiency and cost reduction up to 70 percent as compared to a glass industry manufacturing execution system (MES).
“It is significant that Microsoft technology enabled plant operations to continue as usual during the rollout of the Azure IoT solution, ensuring no disruption to the core manufacturing and deep integration with critical business processes,” Sashi Sreedharan, managing director, Microsoft India, said.
Precimetrix, a Microsoft partner, brought in its Plant Monitoring System hosted on Microsoft Azure to facilitate this transformation. The sensors on conveyor lines were interfaced with data acquisition devices that record the key metrics, as the bottles move along the production line. This data is aggregated on an edge gateway and pushed to Precimetrix’s Plant Monitoring System on the cloud.
A custom solution was developed on top of this platform to provide stage-wise losses, production reports, quality control workflows as well as role-specific KPIs on PCs and smartphones of plant personnel.
Actionable alerts are sent through SMS, email and push notifications whenever there is an anomaly detected or the production efficiency drops.
Piramal will be leveraging Microsoft’s IoT platform and cognitive services to improve operational efficiency and generate new business models from their existing assets and equipment.
