_Improving Packaging Efficiency: Global Healthcare Leader Leveraging ThingWorx RTPPM for Enhanced OEE Data Analysis

About the customer

A leading global healthcare company:

• Highly successful product distributed in 70+ countries.
• Operates directly in 20 countries, including US.
• 3,000+ employees worldwide.

Challenge

With the aim of enhancing operational efficiency, minimizing costs, and optimizing the packaging lines, the global healthcare company partnered with TT PSC and Rockwell Automation to address their challenges and configure an application that would:

• Enable OEE tracking initiatives and optimize production processes, identify bottlenecks, and measure improvement of production metrics (KPIs).
• Automate downtime and waste reasons by utilizing existing PLC data to alleviate manual “clipboard” tracking.
• Implement data integration from multiple sources.

Solution

This project involved implementing data collection from PLCs using Kepware, configuring ThingWorx RTPPM to process and store the data, and configuration of RTPPM for presentation of OEE data to operators, supervisors, and managers.

• Data retrieval of machine running status, production, waste count, and fault codes.
• Configure RTPPM to process operational data to perform OEE calculations for each machine, product type, and by shift.
• Present results to stakeholders via a standard web browser user interface.
• Calculate running and downtime periods based on information from the equipment. Where possible, downtime reasons are determined from fault codes within the PLC. Other downtime reasons can be entered by operators or supervisors manually.
• Waste reason code customization. Enabling with custom code waste reasons codes (from PLC) RTPPM feature.

Results

By leveraging the ThingWorx RTPPM IoT platform, the healthcare client was delivered with a solution that allowed them to analyze and understand OEE resulting in:

• Decreased unplanned downtime.
• Enhanced line performance.
• Optimized maintenance management processes.
• Improved packaging efficiencies.
• Enhanced identification and resolution of bottlenecks.

 Summary

The US-based plant of a global healthcare company aimed to enhance operational efficiency and cost savings by reducing waste and optimizing the packaging line. They selected an application powered by ThingWorx to visualize, track, and analyze data from multiple high speed packaging lines, with a specific focus on improving uptime and throughput.

Transition Technologies PSC (TT USA) was chosen as their implementation partner to leverage the ThingWorx IoT platform to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and other key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to achieve cost savings to:

• Leverage maintenance management.
• Improve line performance.
• Reduce unplanned downtime.
• Identify bottlenecks.
• Analyze waste events.

Client’s quote