Film Manufacturer Cuts Downtime with Proficy MES Software

Customer Story Bar

25%

Reduction in downtime events

15%

Increase in uptime

$ 500K

Savings per year

EXPERT ANALYSIS

Real-time response to line instability issues

Customer Information

Introduction

Company

Major Film Manufacturer

Industry

Chemicals, Manufacturing & Digital Plant

Products

iFIX, Proficy Historian for Cloud, Cloud MES, Proficy Plant Applications, HMI/SCADA, MES - Manufacturing Execution Systems, Proficy Industrial Software, Data Historian

Background

Increasing overall production efficiency

A progressive manufacturer of specialty film products was looking for innovative ways to increase their overall production efficiency.

The company believed if they could marry in-process predictive analytics with their expert engineering and operations teams they’d be able to substantially improve operating efficiencies, specifically by reducing overall downtime.

The company theorized that if they could predict downtime events during production with some advanced warning, they could adjust the manufacturing process in real time to avoid conditions that, left unchecked, would have contributed to costly film breaks.

Challenge

Costly Line Downtime and Waste

The company produces a variety of engineered plastic film products for various industrial uses - each use and customer has its own particular specifications and corresponding ideal operating line conditions.

Line instability can cause off-quality product and lead to very costly line downtime - due to scrapped product and the extended time required for line cleanup when there is a film break.

Each film break can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Solution

Predictive Analytics Combined with Process Knowledge

As part of an overall plan to continuously optimize quality and production, the company has implemented an innovative model of partnering process engineers and operations teams working on a 24x7 basis together using real-time data and analytics as their central focus.

The manufacturer further looked to leverage predictive technologies and added Proficy software to pull in data from multiple disparate data sources, monitor over 400 measures of line stability and leveraging machine learning to continuously predict top potential causes of line instability and film breaks in real time.

Predictive insights are presented to the process engineers in easy to understand displays, distilling thousands of pieces of data into just the elements needed to address the current problems.

Process engineers are able to use GE Vernova’s analytics to see and understand the causes of line instability and make real-time recommendations to the operations team to avoid line instability and film breaks.

Result

Reducing Costs, Increasing Uptime, Minimizing Waste

The manufacturer’s forward-thinking approach has seen real results – improving overall uptime from the mid 80% level to over 90%, saving the company more than $500K annually.

The marriage of Proficy MES software technology with the company’s innovative model of partnering process engineering with operations is delivering new benefits every day.

Currently, the company is expanding its use of Proficy MES software across new lines and new product areas.