From analogue to digital: Manufacturing Case Study | OQLIS Data Analytics
From Analogue to Digital: South African Production Plant’s Digital Transformation
Manufacturing Case Study
Our client is a South African leader in tile and construction adhesives with a track record of more than 4 decades. The company specialises in tiling installation materials, tiling tools, and building solutions and is renowned for the quality.
The problem
The client wanted to transform an analogue and paper-based production plant into an automated digital industry 4.0 plant. Running on legacy manufacturing systems, they needed systems that could operate autonomously from their ERP as they were looking for alternative systems.
They had invested in equipment that could generate data for reporting, but the data was not being collected. However, much of the older equipment needed to be retrofitted with sensors.
They had already started a “digital transformation” in the office environment and wanted to replicate the benefits on their manufacturing floor.
Reporting was backward-looking (from one day, all the way back to a month), making it difficult for managers and executives to know what was happening in the plant, they wanted to know in real time where the bottlenecks were and fix them on the fly.
Their customers had punitive recourse contracts if products and production were not up to standards, which was proving to cut into their profits as they needed to learn what equipment or by which operator any items were produced.
They had no real-time view of raw material usage, everything was stored on a Microsoft Excel sheet which was manually updated during a shift.
The Solution
OQLIS created a laboratory management system to track the quality of raw products moving through the plant and assign these raw materials and unfinished items to the final product. They mapped experiments and tests throughout the process to the system so the quality could be monitored in real time.
They connected all the machines in the production plant to a central database.
The client now used the OQLIS data intelligence platform to provide data in real-time to operations, sales, and management.
They defined industry key performance indicators (KPIs) for all staff in the factory to understand.
Outcomes and benefits
- One pane of glass to monitor, manage, and report on the performance of the entire factory.
- Real-time performance management of the operation, operation can be seen in real-time when production anomalies are on the rise.
- Prediction as to when raw material would run out, to ensure no productivity breaks.
- Increase in production and visibility of the plant’s overall performance
- Reduction in the waste of materials.
- Poor-quality raw materials were identified early in the process, increasing the quality of suppliers.
- Higher percentage of finished goods vs raw materials
- Increase in profitability
