IIoT Journey for an Automotive Tier One Supplier

IIoT

IIoT Journey for an Automotive Tier One Supplier

Grant Gerke | November 22, 2016

Aimed at eliminating defects and waste through quality control and continuous improvement, Lean and Six Sigma are highly popular in manufacturing operations and beyond.

Recently, Hirotec America kicked off a pilot project to test a possible new operations and maintenance strategy for its plant floor assets in 26 facilities across nine countries. The challenge for Hirotec, an automotive Tier One supplier, is to act on a vast array of industrial data from a diverse set of machines on the plant floor.

The company selected PTC’s Kepware KEPServerEX software solution and the ThingWorx Platform to provide an integrated cloud-based solution for the pilot plant in Detroit. At its core, the software server solution allows industrial data to move to the cloud-based platform and provide plant visibility in a much more targeted way.

The interesting aspect to this pilot was the short, six-week Agile sprints.

“The IoT Gateway’s ability to seamlessly put data into ThingWorx to generate real-time insight into operations fuels our sprint framework and allows us to stay nimble in our decision making,” says Justin Hester, senior researcher at Hirotec.

The Scrum model — a process framework requires the use of development cycles called Sprints — provided company executives with visible and quantifiable progress in just weeks.

With the first sprint under its belt, Hirotec reports customized visualization of both operations and conditions of industrial devices and systems. This project also includes some tie-in to an ERP system to optimize part scheduling.

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