Reducing machine downtime and developing new revenue streams with Insights Hub

Ramping up production

Yangzhou Kukai Intelligent Environmental Technology Company (Yangzhou Kukai) is an equipment manufacturer located in China. The company manufactures and markets mask-making machines and runs a production line of its machines to produce masks. With increasing technological advances and low barriers to entry, low-cost competition and customer expectations have been increasing. To remain competitive, Yangzhou Kukai realized the need to turn to digitalization to remain successful and respond quickly to market demand.

The urgency to move to a more digitalized operation greatly increased with the COVID19 pandemic in late 2019. A large increase in mask production was needed to meet the substantially rising demand for masks. Kukai’s machinery customers needed to ramp up production quickly, which meant that Kukai needed to quickly create new services to help remotely optimize machine production capacity.

Challenges to efficiency and quality

In an effort to make production operations more efficient, Yangzhou Kukai had to overcome two core challenges. First, the company lacked real-time monitoring of asset health and insights on how it affected production rates. If assets failed, Yangzhou Kukai was forced to reactively assign service engineers to go onsite and manually determine the root cause. Without insight into how machines are performing at customer sites, users faced reduced production efficiency and higher operational costs.

In addition, Yangzhou Kukai did not have optimized processes in place on its own factory floor. The company lacked centralized digital management and had to rely on paperwork orders to manage the production process. Therefore, it was unable to quantify and analyze core production factors such as output and quality. This situation made it difficult to analyze production data and get insights from it to propose more targeted, data-driven strategies to improve product quality and optimize production processes.

Meeting the challenge with digitalization

To stay ahead of the competition, Yangzhou Kukai realized the importance of digitalization in meeting customer demand. The company turned to Siemens and its experience and capabilities in
industrialization and digitalization, selecting Insights Hub, the industrial IoT solution from Siemens to improve operational decision making, create a new service model and a more advanced production process. Insights Hub is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Use IoT to realize asset condition monitoring and operational transparency

Digitalization is changing the industry landscape by opening the door to more advanced analytics with data collected directly from machines. Using Internet of Things (IoT) data to keep track of asset condition delivers unparalleled operational transparency.

Yangzhou Kukai started by quickly connecting their in-field machines to Insights Hub to collect near-real-time data. The company was able to get their assets and production lines connected to the cloud with minimal effort – a crucial factor in their project plan. Their mask production line was already fitted with SIMATIC S7-1200 controllers from Siemens, which can collect and output a high volume of data. With the Insights Hub plug-and-play connectivity solution, the MindConnect® Nano, the company connected assets to the cloud without additional programming work.

Yangzhou Kukai started by quickly connecting their in-field machines to Insights Hub to collect near-real-time data. The company was able to get their assets and production lines connected to the cloud with minimal effort – a crucial factor in their project plan. Their mask production line was already fitted with SIMATIC S7-1200 controllers from Siemens, which can collect and output a high volume of data. With the Insights Hub plug-and-play connectivity solution, the MindConnect® Nano, the company connected assets to the cloud without additional programming work.

Leveraging IoT data to optimize production efficiency

By leveraging advanced data analytics, the optimized mask production line built by Yangzhou Kukai provides data-driven insight for enterprises to accurately manage and optimize production.

Insights Hub collects real-time mask output data, which replaced the traditional paperwork orders of traditional mask production, reduced errors caused by manual transcription and improved production efficiency.

“Insights Hub has helped us to rapidly implement and deploy the optimized mask production line, providing us and our customers with the power and support of digital transformation, so that we can quickly respond to the large market demand for masks,” says Wang Hongzhong, general manager at Yangzhou Kukai. “We contributed our effort to fight against COVID-19. Meanwhile, with the new business model creation, we will bring added value to our customers and keep competitive competency in our industry.”

With Insights Hub, Yangzhou Kukai can use advanced analytics with quality data to determine pass and fail rates in production. With this approach it is possible to predict and remediate quality problems before they negatively impact production.

Insights Hub can also analyze historical data from production and assets, and send automated alerts to operators to prevent equipment downtime due to untimely material loading, and also reduce the number of onsite operators.

Leveraging industrial IoT to upgrade the business model

As the company reaches the limits of hardware-driven business growth, Yangzhou Kukai is exploring development of new customer-oriented, revenue-boosting business models by leveraging the industrial IoT. Powered by Insights Hub, the company is developing two applications – one for asset management and another for production management.

Through the use of Insights Hub, Yangzhou Kukai is now positioned as a machine builder that can offer additional value-added services to gain new customers and competitive advantage.

“Thanks to Insights Hub, we are empowered to take the lead in integrating digitalization into mask machine manufacturing and bring unprecedented operational transparency and production management optimization to our customers,” says Zhao Lei, director of business development at Yangzhou Kukai. “The insights from IoT data allow us to quickly realize new asset development and iteration and stay competitive in our industry.”