Piramal Glass is using an IoT platform in glass manufacturing

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Piramal Glass began with pharmaceutical glass packaging and later moved on to cosmetics and perfumery. For the last 20 years it has been manufacturing elegant perfume bottles for brands like Dior, L’Oreal, Yves Rocher, Elizabeth Arden and others. According to Shah, Piramal is one of only four companies in the world that make Type-1 Borosilicate glass, a very high quality glass used for injectables.

Holistic Digital strategy
In 2017, Piramal realized that the only way to achieve this level of excellence was to embrace digital. But it wanted to do this in a holistic manner and use digital to transform not just manufacturing, but the whole company.

How Microsoft helped

Piramal Glass deployed Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform to digitally transform its manufacturing operations. It claims to have recovered the investment in technology in just 8 months.
An early adopter of the technology, Piramal Glass has currently implemented the solution, Real-Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI), on 46 production lines across their four plants at Kosamba and Jambusar in Gujarat, India, Sri Lanka and the United States of America. The plants have an overall capacity of 1,375 tons per day, with 12 furnaces and 60 production lines, all of which run on a 24/7 basis.
To facilitate this transformation, Precimetrix, a Microsoft partner, brought in its Plant Monitoring System hosted on Microsoft Azure. The sensors on high speed conveyor lines were interfaced with data acquisition devices that record the key metrics, as the bottles move along the production line. This data is aggregated on an edge gateway and then pushed to Precimetrix’s Plant Monitoring System on the cloud.
A custom solution was developed on top of this platform to provide stage-wise losses, production reports, quality control workflows as well as role-specific KPIs on PCs and smartphones of plant personnel. Actionable alerts are sent through SMS, email and push notifications whenever there is an anomaly detected or the production efficiency drops. In summary, RTMI has democratized real-time information availability to all plant stakeholders, enabling them to take faster decisions.

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