Draxton's successful digital journey with Monitizer® | DISCOVER
Higher productivity, less downtime, improved efficiency: Draxton's successful digital journey with Monitizer® | DISCOVER
Draxton's foundry in Barcelona, Spain has seen its downtime resource and energy consumption decrease after introducing the Monitizer® | DISCOVER IIoT solution, supplied and supported by DISA, a global moulding equipment provider.
A long-time DISA customer, Draxton is a global manufacturer of cast iron and aluminium components with a presence in six countries across three continents. With a total annual casting capacity exceeding 620,000 tons, it produces complex components for brakes, powertrain and transmission systems, primarily for the automotive industry in North America, Europe and China.
The challenge
Through its whole production process, Draxton constantly invests in the latest technology and best practices. When it decided it wanted better visibility of its production processes at its Barcelona site, implementing Monitizer | DISCOVER was a logical choice. DISCOVER's well-known ability to deliver a live digital view of production was the perfect way to support the Draxton foundry's application of its ongoing Lean Production initiative.
"We decided to use Monitizer | DISCOVER because it is a specialised application that is completely focused on the foundry industry," says Javier Heredia, Plant Manager at Draxton Barcelona. "We considered building our own Industry 4.0 solution but other foundries were already successfully using Monitizer | DISCOVER. We trusted DISA's experts to deliver a robust solution – and we were proved right."
Smart Alarms. Smarter Maintenance.
Smart alarms control production
"We can set thresholds based on the knowledge of our internal experts and configure alarms that notify production and maintenance to take action before an issue become serious," explains Antonio. "Our DISCOVER system supports monitoring, analysis and insight right across all our different production areas and equipment. This is a significant advantage as, previously, we had separate systems that we couldn't switch easily between. "
DISCOVER's information has become an integral part of the Barcelona facility's daily operational meetings where the team discuss and solve technical and quality issues.
"Monitizer is particularly useful during operations meetings," says Javier. "If problems occur, we can analyse them by querying the process data that Monitizer holds and decide on the right course of action. When we find the root cause – or causes – we can dig deeper into the data to find out how to prevent it happening again and set alarms if required."
Preventive maintenance
At Draxton, Monitizer has helped the maintenance team establish a preventive maintenance programme. It identifies premature furnace wear and automatically alerts both maintenance and production when parameters fall out of specification.
"We are effectively using Monitizer as a preventative maintenance tool," says Jose Garcia, Quality Manager at Draxton Barcelona. "Being alerted by DISCOVER's alarm means we can immediately check the right KPIs rather than searching across all the data for the cause of the problem. Based on the data, we can schedule preventative maintenance which avoids the issue occurring." Before Monitizer, the Barcelona facility faced a bottleneck from limited moulding sand supply. Using DISCOVER data, the team optimised the sand plant’s cycle time to match water addition.
"This cycle time optimisation removed the bottleneck and stabilised sand quality, while cutting water and energy consumption," explains Jose. "That gave us a higher quality and also a more sustainable process. Monitizer is also connected to our entire suction and dust collection system to ensure damaging airborne particles are effectively filtered for safe working conditions."
Next steps
"Monitizer | DISCOVER has helped us implement and enhance lean manufacturing and predictive maintenance, and we use its information to constantly learn about and enhance different parts of our operations," says plant manager Javier. "It has definitely helped us improve casting quality while lowering resource and energy consumption. That has lowered our carbon emissions and DISCOVER's digital process view will also be invaluable as we begin our new sustainability initiative."
In a short time, Draxton Barcelona has advanced rapidly on its digital journey, becoming expert at using data to better manage operations, achieving major benefits – with ambitious plans ahead.
"We now have a customised real-time view of both our lines so we can be sure the foundry is always running as we want it to – and will be alerted automatically if it isn't," Javier says. "Next, we plan to add even more parameters to DISCOVER and eventually evolve towards full process optimisation with Monitizer | PRESCRIBE. Now we have successfully implemented Monitizer, our colleagues at our other international facilities will be very interested in trying it for themselves."