‘Finding a needle in a haystack’ is the old idiom, and any industrial millwright or maintenance technician knows how it can apply to solving an unplanned downtime event. The dream of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is to connect every straw in the haystack to a central data processor, so that you can analyze the data and pinpoint the exact location of your needle in minutes. For some manufacturers, downtime can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per minute, so it’s critical to have an advantage when the clock is ticking. Spotlight, a machine data service from HTM Sensors, is one system that may provide this advantage.
There’s lots of software out there that lets you aggregate high level data about your downtime and draw general inferences about plant productivity. But when something goes wrong, how do you pinpoint exactly what it is, so you can fix it and get back up and running?
This software platform is IIoT for a millwright or mechanic. Bob Hooper, VP sales and marketing at HTM Sensors, explains:
“This is our unplanned downtime manager. We are trying to get to the truth: the one input in your plant that’s causing you the most money, lost parts, and time in your plant that’s costing you money. We want to get to the one spot. In this environment, a live data stream from a welding plant is tracking sensors, valves, safety, anything electric on the machine, we can track it. Coming right from the machine plc. Through the network. No operator entering info, no barcode, true info from machine. In this instance, we’re tracking sensors and major events. We’re tracking downtime caused by the sensors. So, if we go into one of these input levels, we’re going to a cell, and an input. In this case, it’s telling us to look right here on a typical HMI screen.”
The software is designed to ‘drill down’ to the one spot costing the most time and most money in the plant. Downtime is shown on a month, week, or 24h cycle.
With other systems out there, you can aggregate high level data about your runtime statistics. But you have a lot of sensors in any machine cell, and when you have a failure, it crashes and goes down. But which sensor caused the issue? If there are 8 or 10 sensors, the temptation is to start swapping sensors, trying to generate the fault. But the clock is ticking. This system shows the exact sensor and over the last month, last week, which one is continually giving problems. Those reports allow you to adjust scheduling and manage time with your people to send electricians, maintenance people to go directly to the correct spot.
After a tooling change or continuous improvement change, the system can track the results and show exactly how much downtime and savings came from the change.
This system is best for those intermittent problems where the machine goes down, and by the time the millwright gets to the problem unit, it’s cooled down and now it works fine. You can chase in circles forever until you tear your hair out in frustration. In some machines you have an A side and a B side, it can show data for each of those sides, machines, cells, and lines in the plant. It drills down to the one spot.
Like most MES or SCADA systems, HTM will install a box processor at the machine PLC with a network cable output and standard 120V power input. This device sends data up into the cloud for processing, and the data is delivered over the internet to desktop or devices. According to Hooper, the system works together with other MES and ERP systems.
“Other systems track start, end, runtime, downtime, and total production, but this system shows what really happened. This device takes you to the one spot causing issues in your plant,” said Hooper.
For more on MES systems, check out VIDEO: Muratec Processnet MES Uses IoT to Maximize OEE