Great achievement for Industry 4.0 and IoT at Oerlikon HRSflow. Sharing information between the manufacturing floor and business systems enables the company to increase operational efficiency.

One dedicated team and one ambitious goal: connecting Oerlikon HRSflow machine control systems to the company network. Thanks to IoT development, machine tools become smarter: the company can now collect and archive a huge amount of data coming from the production floor providing management with strategic information useful to support decision-making processes.

The MES (Manufacturing Execution System) is the link between the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) - the software which allows to control orders, purchases, sales and warehouse – and the manufacturing level. Thanks to the data interconnection, the company can monitor and optimize the operations related to the production cycle in real time: from the launch of the order to the finished part.

The IoT module included in the MES allows Oerlikon HRSflow to manage data bi-directionally. It translates the information coming from the ERP in a language easily understandable to the machine control system. Vice versa, the data coming from the machine tools can finally be translated in an intelligible language for the ERP. This centralizing system distributes the strategic information deriving from the manufacturing floor to the various software belonging to the different departments: from Business Intelligence to the planning tools useful to organize the production, from the authoring tools used to start the mechanical processing to other factory operating systems.

Oerlikon HRSflow Lean Office Manager Andrea Feltrin states “The main goal of the team involved in this project was the flow optimization of the different phases of a job. Thanks to a lean approach, every request can therefore be processed in an effective way in full compliance with the main principles of continuous improvement.”

The real-time data exchange between these two worlds provides several benefits at Oerlikon HRSflow:

• It gives a complete visibility on what happens in production increasing overall equipment efficiency (OEE). It allows to monitor the causes of any possible downtime or machine alarms (for example due to some malfunctions or tool breakages), the number of units produced, the scrap rate or the time spent for the production process. Moreover, in case of defective parts, it facilitates corrective actions giving a great support to the part quality check.
• It enables the company to react more flexibly to changes in demand. The data integration allows to manage the information flow starting from the new Requests of Offer to the machine output avoiding any delivery delays. On the other hand, the MES software communicates changes in the production process to the ERP tool in real-time, so that price calculations and delivery times can be adjusted at the business level.
• It allows for a more accurate demand forecast. Integrating real-time data about the availability of materials across the entire supply chain with ERP systems, it allows to reduce inventories and avoid overproduction. In addition, it helps the Company minimize unnecessary interruptions and delays.
• It reduces the human error because the machine software can be always updated without the use of an USB drive.
• It provides strategic information to management. Thanks to this integration, business decisions are always based on real-time data coming from the machine control systems supporting the development of a continuous improvement strategy.
• It enables the remote control of all machine tools.

Since manufacturing processes are becoming increasingly complex, the traceability of products throughout their entire lifecycles - from design to delivery – is fundamental to achieve more efficient production. Oerlikon HRSflow Chief Operating Officer Umberto Santin states, “In the present competitive global markets, having a lean manufacturing process is more important than ever. Thanks to IoT development and the integration of the manufacturing floor and business systems, we will be able to respond more and more flexibly to changing customer demands or other market variables, thus, increasing the trust in our company.”