工厂运营可见性和智能

The world's 1st-ever Industrial Internet platform, Predix, becomes a pathway for revenue generation and notable new cost savings for Pitney Bowes' production mail business. An ordinary mail business, this is not. Of the 150 million pieces of mail produced each day in the US, the majority go through Pitney Bowes machines.

As a part of their Industry 4.0 initiative, the customer primarily wished to leverage IoT for maximizing operational efficiencies, productivity, reducing the energy footprints and maximizing capacity utilization. But there were several challenges at the outset:Firstly, the customer had multiple assembly lines with a diverse set of machines, systems and sensors, all communicating on different protocols. As such, primarily they needed a partner who could connect diverse set of assets on to a single platform and make use of underutilized ‘dark’ data.Secondly, the amount of data, data types and their applications was so vast, that the platform handling it, needed to be scalable and flexible.Lastly, Varroc faced the typical challenge of innovating in ‘Brownfield’ markets – wherein the real bottleneck is in integrating IoT in tandem with both the new and legacy equipment without any further CAPEX for asset substitution.

Each day, PAK picked up soiled linen which had been hand counted by its customers. On the following day, they were expected to return the exact same amount of linens. However, manual counts conducted by PAK’s customers were always inaccurate (a problem inherent to soiled counting) and not being able to return exact amounts was very problematic. PAK sought an RFID-enabled textile-tracking system to enable total linen monitoring throughout the whole linen cycle, while increasing facility and operation efficiency, preventing loss and ensuring customers receive the correct textiles. PAK chose to work with USTEK RFID Solutions, a sister company that designs and manufactures integrated RFID terminals for industrial laundry markets worldwide. It was challenging to find RFID products that operated well in the PAK facility, as the environment was damp and full of metal trolleys. After testing many different readers, chips and antennas in the facility, USTEK and PAK chose to use Impinj products due to their superior performance.