PTC > Case Studies > Automotive Parts Supplier Launches IoT Initiative in SixWeek Sprints Powered by PTC IoT Manufacturing Solutions

Automotive Parts Supplier Launches IoT Initiative in SixWeek Sprints Powered by PTC IoT Manufacturing Solutions

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

ThingWorx IoT Platform
KEPServerEX
IoT Gateway Advanced Plug-In
Manufacturing Suite

Tech Stack

IoT
Cloud Computing
Data Analytics
ERP Systems

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Maintenance

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance
Manufacturing System Automation
Asset Health Management (AHM)

Services

System Integration
Data Science Services

About The Customer

HIROTEC AMERICA is part of the HIROTEC Group Companies, a $1.6 billion corporation with over 60 years of mass production experience and engineering discipline. With 26 facilities in nine countries around the world, HIROTEC Group is globally recognized as a premier automation manufacturing equipment and parts supplier. For over 50 years, top vehicle producers like General Motors and Mazda have used HIROTEC’s proven, high-quality industrial manufacturing concepts and systems. The parts and tooling supplier designs and builds roughly 7 million doors and 1.5 million exhaust systems a year, making it one of the largest private production companies in today’s global automotive market.

The Challenge

HIROTEC AMERICA, a part of the HIROTEC Group Companies, faced significant operational downtime issues. The machinery involved ran without condition-based monitoring, operating until a failure occurred. This reactive maintenance approach led to lost opportunities and inefficiencies. HIROTEC had been collecting industrial data from sensors and machines across customer production facilities and its own systems. However, this data was manually separated and stored across multiple sources, making it inaccessible for collective and systematic analysis. To improve quality, reduce downtime, and optimize production schedules, HIROTEC needed to implement a modern, automated solution that could gather maintenance and operational information into one source and offer actionable recommendations to its quality professionals.

The Solution

HIROTEC turned to the ThingWorx IoT Platform and Kepware’s KEPServerEX to enable company-wide device-to-cloud connectivity through one overarching toolset. The ThingWorx platform provided analytical insight into HIROTEC’s data through industrial data streamed from the IoT Gateway for KEPServerEX, an advanced plug-in capable of pushing information from KEPServerEX into Big Data and analytic software applications. HIROTEC collaborated with representatives at PTC to build an IoT framework supported by short, six-week Agile sprints. The Scrum model provided company executives with visible and quantifiable progress in just weeks. HIROTEC’s North American shop in Detroit, Michigan was chosen as the test bed for the first small sprint because of the unique data types generated among its eight Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines.

Operational Impact

Improved visibility into the processes of the CNC shop and gained deeper insight into operations.
Added the ability to leverage real-time data from the shop floor and tie it to the scheduling ERP system, optimizing the scheduling of parts to CNC modules.
Increased productivity and ROI by gaining greater insight into asset and resource allocation.
Improved collaboration between Operations and Information Technology (IT) departments, reducing downtime and enabling more efficient responses to IT jobs.
Reduced costs, effort, and development time by selecting proven, interoperable technologies.