With over 400 years of experience in the glass industry, Heinz-Glas GmbH & Co. KGaA is one of the oldest and most successful companies in its sector. Founded in 1622 in Piesau, Thuringia, the company is today one of the global market leaders in the production and refinement of glass bottles and crucibles for the perfume and cosmetics industry, with annual sales of around 430 million euros. The portfolio is supplemented by a range of various plastic containers and closures from the Heinz-Plastics Group.
Agile
In just 150 person days to the MVP
Live
Rapid fault detection with real-time production data
Transparent
Three dashboards for employees on the line and in the office
Stable
The Actyx platform provides high reliability and scalability
Initial situation
Sustainable success is increasingly a question of the right answers to the digital transformation, even for traditional companies. In order to proactively help shape the transformation of the industry, Heinz-Glas decided to make its manufacturing processes transparent for all business segments with the help of digital systems. The overarching goal was to promote a smooth production process, to collect data from different systems centrally, to identify problems in critical production processes in real time, and to gain valuable insights into possible areas of optimization.
A lot of work had already been done in this field in the past. A monitoring system for glass gobs measures the temperature, size, and angle of the cut glass gob in real time. Other systems, for example, monitor the production line and try to detect faults using various forms of optical analysis.
However, there are still gaps in many places: Firstly, relevant employees are often unable to access information directly, and secondly, the data is not available in a central location. Fast and targeted intervention is only possible to a limited extent. A total of four systems provide relevant data from production, but they all feature a different user interface.
Solution
codecentric was chosen as implementation partner due to its extensive expertise, both from numerous IIoT projects and specifically in the implementation of the Actyx platform. This was selected based on the desired reliability and scalability. The aim was to significantly improve the overall flow of information and to create a central source of information in production. It was intended to enable both line workers and office staff to respond as flexibly as possible to production problems. The aim was also to create the basis for an even more comprehensive system in the future.
The implementation of the project was based on an agile approach. A large part of the solution is composed of different connectors that extract and process information from existing systems, such as the glass gob monitoring system. The data collected in this way is first fed into the distributed system Actyx in the form of events and distributed across several nodes. A node in the system may be, for example, a connector or the access point to a dashboard. The dashboard nodes now collect the events received and store them in a time series database. Each dashboard node has its own database, meaning that the load is optimally distributed. The data is then aggregated and displayed in dashboards using Grafana. These dashboards have been specially tailored to the needs of users and can be flexibly adapted.
Result
The completed system is in productive use and will be rolled out to several lines in the future. The dashboards have been designed to be easily customized and are prepared for future development. The following successes were achieved just two weeks after the rollout:
- Detailed monitoring of production for all employees on the line
- Additional dashboard with dedicated information for back office colleagues
- Historical data archiving enables retrospective analysis
- Future-oriented design as a flexible basis for further projects
Thanks to the new monitoring solution, we have significantly faster and deeper insights into our production processes. Previously, there were some blind spots, which made it difficult to identify problems. Now all it takes is a glance at one of our three production dashboards and we immediately have starting points where we can take action. This saves us time and will also help us to maintain and improve the quality of our products in the long term.
codecentric has supported us from day 1 and asked the right questions. The cooperation was consistently positive and it quickly became clear that we could draw on a lot of relevant experience here.
Michael Wagner
Global Operational Excellence Expert at HEINZ-GLAS
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IT Consultant