Metal Process Industry
Connect and Integrate with a new global value-chain
Connect and Integrate with a new global value-chain
Traditional metal processing frequently changed processes and required high standards of accuracy. These challenges make it difficult for industrial transformation.
A combination of Industry 4.0 and IoT, smart robots and big data analysis will move towards an open architecture, modularity and expandability, and multi-station connection will achieve flexible manufacturing through production records to improve production visibility and efficiency.
Challenges in the Metal Processing Industry
- 01
Difficult to keep track of supply chain status
The metal processing industry is complex, with many product specifications and manufacturing processes. More than 90% of the manufacturers are small and medium-sized enterprises. Each manufacturer is positioned in a niche market and has its own focus on production capability. Industrialists specify materials and specifications according to their needs. Manufacturing suppliers collect orders for customization or order production, but progress tracking is complicated and difficult.
- 02
Complicated after-sales service
Customers request immediate service to reduce equipment downtime. Metal processing manufacturers have begun to use information technology to improve their competitive advantage in the after-sales service process. Since machine tools are products with high unit price and large amounts of parts and complex assembly process. Therefore, metal processing must have rapid provision of parts replacement and quality maintenance services to avoid losses caused by work stoppages.
- 03
High-value high-end application challenges
The aerospace and automobile industry are highly complex and intensive operations. They are industries that need to build a collaborative business environment. This means systems with the same format and standards can better support product development. This also applies to after-sales service. By doing this, the metal processing industry can accelerate prototyping, designing, and testing to shorten development timelines.
- 04
Fewer births and aging problems cause labor shortages
The traditional metal processing industry is regarded as a labor intensive slightly dirty business. This greatly reduces the appeal and incentive for workers to join the industry, resulting in a shortage of labor, which adds additional pressures to the metal processing industry.
iFactory@ Metal Process Industry
The iFactory solution suite for metal processing focuses not only on utilizing capacity, but on the improvement of production yields. A series of functions for data processing, storage, and protocol translation, drive forward the intelligent transformation of the metal process industry.
Advantages
- 01
Real-time production and quality monitoring
- 02
Upgrade after-sales service management
- 03
Improves metal processing technology
- 04
Strengthens value chain integration
- 05
Production flexibility
- 06
IoT connection and flexible production scheduling
I.App of the Solution Suite
Preventive Maintenance
A preventive maintenance system makes you maintain your equipment and assets regularly and keep them running and prevent unplanned downtime from unexpected equipment failure.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
Visualized monitoring of OEE indicators and KPIs of the whole plant through data acquisition, aggregation, and machine utilization analysis, smart factory production efficiency management can be easily realized to increase productivity, review and analysis of major losses, improve equipment utilization, and effectively increase production capacity.
Andon
Andon system is an alarm system which can improve the response time of supervisors or technician by triggerring signal when issues are occurred in the manufacturing process.
Shop Floor
Shop Floor is a manufacturing management system for real-time production tracking, scheduling and status reporting of work orders or operations, which improves progress control for supervisors.
System Architectures of Metal Process Industry
Co-Creation with DFSI
Industrial IoT (IIoT) involves integrating big data, cloud, and AI applications. To embrace this trend, Advantech is collaborating with domain-focused system integrators (DFSIs) to develop industrial apps (I.Apps).