Leveraging real-time KPIs to increase overall machine efficiency

Supporting digitalization

The Low Voltage Motor (LVM) factory is located in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was founded in 1972 as PINSA and acquired by Siemens in 1982. It is the only factory in Mexico dedicated to producing low-voltage motors. It specializes in manufacturing motors that meet National Electric Manufacturers Association (NEMA) standards and is primarily focused on the North American market. The factory produces more than 60,000 motors per year and employs around 500.

The company is using Insights Hub, the industrial IoT solution from Siemens for improved operational decision making, to support the factory´s digitalization strategy with the ultimate goal of reaching productivity targets, improving delivery reliability and enhancing the accuracy of production data.

In the past, computer numerical control (CNC) machines in the plant were operated in isolation and there was no data traffic shared over the industrial network. Because the machines were not connected to the network, machining equipment performance measurements such as production time, machine availability and quality losses were compiled manually. In addition, the lack of connectivity made generating historical data complicated. Manual calculations were used to estimate data, leading to less than accurate performance measurements. The plant leadership and the engineers wanted to prioritize automated calculations to ensure that accurate outputs are provided in the reports.

To achieve this, the plant selected the Insights Hub capability package, which provides the user with an account for their resources on Insights Hub, and Insights Hub Visual Flow Creator, a browser-based workflow editor. All three are part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

After examining the plant requirements, the Siemens Mexican customer support team recommended a buy decision and for the plant to adopt industrial IoT to address its challenges. Thus, the Siemens Guadalajara plant became the first Mexican plant to adopt Insights Hub. Because of the experience of other motion control plants in Europe along with Siemens’ reputation, the Guadalajara plant purchased a three-year subscription.

Keys to success

The LVM Guadalajara plant needed a platform that could be used to facilitate improvements, enhance the use of resources as well as seamlessly develop real-time dashboards. They believed that an efficient real-time dashboard system would allow decisions to be made quickly and would increase the engineers’ confidence in the data so they could be more assertive in pushing for plant efficiency.

The management wanted to automate the calculation of overall equipment efficiency (OEE) for their critical CNC machines in real time. The primary goal was to enhance accuracy by getting rid of manual and imprecise calculations.

It was important to connect machines to ensure that disparate systems could be used in tandem to provide meaningful data to overall operations.

Using Insights Hub capability package and Insights Hub Visual Flow Creator, Siemens was able to build a platform that could be used to recommend improvement measures as well as optimize the use of resources and seamlessly create real-time dashboards.

The MindAccess solution provided the plant with real-time automated calculations of OEE for 14 critical CNC machines. Connectivity between machines was established using Brownfield gateway connectivity (BGC). Human-machine interfaces (HMIs) have been installed to collect data and calculate OEE in Insights Hub. In addition to OEE calculation, using Edge2Web, the Guadalajara plant created dashboards to monitor consumption of energy resources like electricity and gas in real time.

Using the Insights Hub solution, the plant improved machining time by 8 percent on the production lines within the first six months. The plant has also seen the following improvements in overall operations:

• Increased performance efficiency

• Reduced changeover times

With the above improvements, the plant is expecting to save $160,000 in two years after all the expenses.

Going forward the Siemens Guadalajara LVM factory is planning to connect more CNC machines to Insights Hub. They also plan to extend the current use case to the assembly building. In addition, the management is exploring options to include statistical data processes in the next version of Insights Hub in FY22.