A CASE STUDY WITH ONE OF THE TOP MACHINE OEM IN INDIA – MARSHALL MACHINES LTD.
Marshall Industries was started by Mr. Gautam Sarup, more than 54 years ago. From manufacturing Hosiery machines, he moved on to design & manufacture high precision Bench Lathes, Heavy Duty Lathes & Capstan Lathes, thousands of which were sold all over the country.
Their Product range grew to include All Geared Lathes, Multi Spindle Drilling/Tapping Machines & Special Purpose Machines.
Our latest-generation Slant Bed CNC Turning Centers have been developed by benchmarking against the leading machine tool manufacturers in the world.
They do not merely sell CNC Turning Centres but “PROVIDE COMPLETE TURNING SOLUTIONS TO BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & REDUCE COST PER COMPONENT FOR OUR ESTEEMED CUSTOMERS.
OEM EXPECTATIONS
Marshall as an OEM tried many Industry 4.0 product from various Indian as well as international companies. There were a lot of factors in their checklist to shortlist the right partner. But most important ones are follows
- Level of sophistication & advancement of solution in terms hardware & software
- Capability to make customisations in hardware & software to retrieve data from Marshall advance as well as legacy machines.
- Support, Cost & White labelled branding option of complete solution.
Marshall team did a lot of benchmarking based on these factors between various players product in the market along with Hiotron smart machine monitoring solution for almost 2-3 months.
But finally Marshall decided to partner with Hiotron for their industry 4.0 journey because Hiotron not just matched expectations as per their checklist but also added lot of values throughout 360º which stood Hiotron unique from the rest.
THE CHALLENGES
- Connection establishment between IOT box & OEMs different machines Controllers & PLCs.
- Real time production data, machine health, quality, alarms & sensor parameters fetch from machine.
- Data backup in case internet connection lost.
- Complete understanding of the machine with its various different parameters.
- Provision to collect Production / sensor data via I/O for machines which were legacy or not having advance controllers or PLCs.
THE SOLUTION
A complete project divided into 2 categories of team, Hardware as well as software.
Major role of Hardware team was to design hardware which can collect data from new as well as sold machines. Major controller, PLC & protocols are as per below.
- Siemens – OPC UA
- FANUC – FOCAS or MTconnect
- Ethernet based PLCs – Modbus/Profibus/RS485 & others
- Other legacy machines – Via I/O 24 volt relay based
On the other side, Software Team rebranded the existing IOT portal on the name, URL (ummtechnology.com) & theme branding of Marshall. Not just that many machine specific custom logics & algorithms built & incorporated in the existing IOT platform such as Alarms, Tool & Die life monitoring & alert mechanism, key parameters reports, SAP integration, Quality parameters charts, comparison, ticket based, predicative & preventive maintenance  and much more.
THE RESULT
Starting from 2021 more than 500 Marshall machines connected which helped Marshall to stay ahead of the competition and offer more advanced machines and its after sale services to their customers, resulting in better value and a more positive experience.
Overall, This initiative helped Marshall to boost their sales of new machines in the market & improved service & support of their sold machines.
Some of the common benefits which Marshall & their customers received
- Immediate transformation from Log book to Digital book.
- Immediate Shop floor Visibility & ROI within 3-6 months
- Informed Decision Making due to Comprehensive Data & Dashboards
- Improved Productivity due to Quicker Corrective Action
- Enhanced Operational Excellence due to Automated Systems
- Increased efficiency by real time OEE (Availability, Performance, Quality) & machine utilization monitoring
- Alerts & Notifications on abnormality
- Predictive & Preventive maintenance
- Process Optimization
- Machine Health, Sensor & Condition Monitoring