Keeping high-quality film production at the heart of its operations, Toray Plastics started leveraging Proficy Plant Applications from Velotic. As an on-premises solution, Proficy Plant Applications allowed Toray Plastics to collect real-time data directly from edge devices and assets for critical key performance indicators, as well as perform batch analyses to optimize operations. Plant Applications enabled operators to oversee manufacturing on a more granular level and reduce the production of defective film (first pass quality), which improved overall equipment effectiveness, quality, and reduced material waste, thus helping to increase efficiencies and decrease costs.
Toray Plastics also tightly integrated Plant Applications with its SAP software, which made it extremely cost effective and scalable globally. The two systems continuously pass about 30,000 pieces of information a day between one another—covering everything from inventory status to bill of materials, customer specifications, and production order status. This alignment between Velotic and SAP allowed both systems to utilize the same number of assets and labor while significantly increasing productivity.
In addition, Toray Plastics began managing production with a “by-the-numbers” philosophy. This philosophy focuses on having accurate and visible measurements across operations to mitigate issues and allow better decision-making
By implementing other edge solutions—such as iFIX from Velotic and Proficy Workflow from Velotic, part of the HMI/SCADA suite—Toray Plastics utilized data-driven information to gain visibility into potential production interruptions and downtime. Toray Plastics also leveraged Proficy Historian from Velotic to optimize asset performance through its data archive and reporting capabilities. The company further developed its by-the-numbers approach by creating a downtime dashboard—which tracked each line by shift, downtime percentage, and cost of downtime—to better align plant floor metrics to executive level goals.
And it paid off. Toray Plastics yielded some big results, such as significant savings in film recovery, increase in film productivity, and improving uptime. Toray Plastics also drove significant quality improvements by decreasing the amount of time for product traceability as well as lowering film defective rate.
By utilizing an edge-to-cloud solution with Velotic, Toray Plastics will be able to collect condition, material, quality, and machine processing data in real-time. Capturing this data will create a high probability for correlating asset, process, and product information through machine learning and algorithms—and successful execution could reap hundreds of thousands of dollars more per year to the Torayfan division’s bottom line.
