The Mold-Rite Plastics (MRP) plant in Plattsburgh, New York, makes caps — millions of caps — including the child-resistant caps for pharmaceutical bottles and the flip-top caps for liquid dispensing bottles like those used for hand-sanitizing solutions.
MRP’s molding operation has 90 molding machines running on a 24-hour, 7-day schedule. Supporting those molding machines are about 56 plastics blenders, which mix virgin material, color, and often up to 25% regrind.
Automation Supervisor Todd Duprey, who oversees the molding operations, was having issues with lost productive machine time and looking for a solution.
“With one of my old-style blenders,” Duprey said, “if it ran out of color, for instance, it would alarm and it would shut down. A light would go off and sometimes an operator would know about it. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes we couldn’t get a process tech over there or we couldn’t get the right person to address the problem. And it would leave things down for a while. This is especially a problem at night when we don’t have as many people working.
“So very often, I’d have to deal with it the next morning and it’s not always easy because everything is recorded on an SD memory card. So, in order for me to track any information on a specific machine, I would have to pull the SD card, download it to my desktop and then cipher through all the information. It wasn’t very user friendly.”
An even bigger problem is what happens when a blender runs out of a component and is not addressed in a timely manner. The result is a machine that will be running scrap parts and losing money in material and lost productive machine time.
Connecting blenders to the industrial internet of things
MRP decided to implement SmartServices®, the Conair Industry 4.0 solution for auxiliary equipment monitoring, management and analysis. Now, all of the blenders are connected to the cloud-based platform. Duprey described the set up as “unbelievably awesome.”
With SmartServices, everything is simplified. Duprey identifies key performance indicators (KPIs) and programs them into the system. He can choose any KPI — the amount of color being fed to a blender, for instance — and set a custom performance threshold. Whenever the conditions move outside of that performance threshold, the SmartServices portal alerts team members so that appropriate action can be taken.
“Until now,” Duprey continued, “I’ve had it set up to send me an email every time we have an alarm, even in the middle of the night. I can log in through my laptop, without leaving home, see what the problem is and address it.”
If necessary, Duprey can log into the blender control remotely to check set points and actual readings and even make changes.
Reacting quickly to prevent downtime
Now that he’s gotten more familiar and comfortable with the system, Duprey has begun to involve other plant personnel in the troubleshooting process.
“Now I have the system shooting emails out to plant supervisors and production leads on the floor. They’ll get an email the instant we run out color or for whatever reason it alarms. So, they’re going to be able to identify it on the spot and address it before the press actually shuts down. We have a reservoir underneath each blender that holds about an hour’s worth of material so we’ve got an hour to react. That’s awesome because it gives us an hour to get somebody over there to fix the problem before it actually causes us downtime.”
Tracking down quality issues
As good as the system is, however, some off-color product (what Duprey calls “lights and darks”) can still get shipped. This generates a Customer Action Report, and he needs to find out what happened.
Since all shipments are time/date stamped, this is easy. Using the SmartServices portal, Duprey can quickly go back into the system history and identify which blender had a problem and determine exactly when and for how long.
The SmartServices portal also has the ability to track how much of various materials are being processed and confirm that the ratios of virgin, regrind and colorant are as they should be. Correlating total throughput with total parts produced provides a check on the accuracy of quoting and allows MRP to be more accurate in its estimates.
Scaling up the connected factory
As more equipment is connected to the system, Duprey expects his IT department to make much greater use of SmartServices. In the near future, he’ll be able to connect his FLX conveying control system into SmartServices and have the same centralized monitoring, control and data-gathering capabilities that he has on his Conair blenders.
“That’s definitely where I’m trying to take our company,” Duprey said. “I want things smart. I want traceability. I want to be able get useful information out of our systems. I want to get our systems to really work for us, and Conair is the company helping us get there.”