Volume 3 Issue 8 August 2021
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In this Issue
Welcome to Industree 4.0 for August 2021, exclusively sponsored by SAP.
SAP
By Karin Fent and Alfred Becker, SAP
Italian Design Meets Industry 4.0: How One Manufacturer is Reinventing its Plant
When it comes to Italian design – or Italian cuisine for that matter – we are passionate fans. From automobiles and fashion to mill products, furniture and construction, design innovation matters for Italian companies across industries.

Arpa Industriale S.p.A. offers a perfect case study. Over 60 years of investment in research and a commitment implementing Industry 4.0 technologies have helped the company gain a global reputation for innovative Italian design and unsurpassed quality in high-end surface materials.

The story below involving use of Industry 4.0 technologies to reinvent production, reduce waste and optimize quality is highly relevant to paper and packaging companies – so please read on!

A New Factory Built from Scratch for a One-of-a-Kind Product Line

Arpa designed and built the FENIX factory to continuously improve and innovate.

Since its launch in 2013, FENIX surface materials had become one of the most important product lines for Arpa, accounting for over 50% of the company’s turnover. And while FENIX is revolutionizing interior design worldwide, it’s expensive and prone to defects using traditional HPL production processes. The surface is very thin, and the matte surface will show even the slightest defect. Defects that result in a large amount of wasteful scrap materials.

Arpa knew it could further improve product quality – which is why it built a new factory dedicated solely to the FENIX line. This factory has helped Arpa stabilize and optimize a complex supply and production process – while enabling it to meet ambitious targets for renewable energy use, resource consumption, and waste reduction.

Designed from the Ground Up to Continuously Improve

Arpa designed and built the FENIX factory to continuously improve and innovate by constantly monitoring and analyzing all aspects of operation – from the warehouse and plant floor machinery to the air conditioning system. The factory runs entirely on SAP software – which establishes a single integrated technology platform to drive ongoing innovation.

Arpa connected the factory’s programmable logic controller (PLC) directly to its plant connectivity system. This allows the FENIX factory team to monitor everything in real-time, running PLC sensor data through machine learning algorithms to analyze every millisecond of daily operations.

Instead of analyzing what’s done wrong, Arpa uses dashboards, predictive analytics, and embedded automation to identify the very best employee practices and then “coach” the plant machinery to deliver the same results.

For example, scrap-monitoring dashboards help operators identify the employees with the best scrap-reduction practices. By combining this insight with configuration changes in the factory’s application landscape, the FENIX factory eliminated almost all of its scrap waste in the first year of operation!

Sensor Data Visibility for Total Supply Automation

The FENIX factory’s sensor network is extensive. Over 1,600 sensors cover everything from raw material, warehouse, and production operations to an industrial-scale HVAC system and an award-winning 2-megawatt solar array that powers the factory. All of the PLC sensor data, messages, and events are visible – allowing the FENIX factory team to identify intelligent automation opportunities across all aspects of the operation.

The factory warehouse operation, for example, is fully automated. Laser-guided vehicles (LGVs) work autonomously 24x7 to scan, load, and reload rolls of raw materials on to production machines. To keep raw material provisioning and production line scheduling in synch with latest demand signals, the LGVs stay connected in real-time with the latest order information from CRM and warehouse management applications.

And by capturing PLC sensor/consumption data every few milliseconds and using predictive algorithms to analyze 5,000 different parameters, the factory has helped improve product quality while reducing energy and water consumption to a fifth of what it was a year earlier.

The Factory of the Future: Sustainable operations and ROI

So far, the results are dramatic:

  1. 96% reduction in scrap waste
  2. 80% reduction in water, energy, and other resources used
  3. 6x productivity improvement over traditional high-pressure laminate factories
  4. €750,000 in production cost saving in the first year

Sensor data combined with predictive analytics and operational dashboards will enable the factory team to reduce waste by another 50% over the next year. But these benefits are just the beginning for the FENIX factory and Arpa.

An Innovative Factory Designed As an Innovation Pipeline

So much of Arpa’s success hinges on the key decisions they made at the beginning of the project, such as running entirely on an integrated business technology platform from a single enterprise software provider. This approach helps FENIX factory team dramatically reduce complexity and fast track new breakthroughs to its other factories, including embedding the latest employee best practices into target factory’s operations.

In fact, Arpa’s approach to design innovation helped establish the FENIX factory as an Industry 4.0 best-practice and solution model for manufacturing and supply chain excellence worldwide – to which I say, “Bravissimo!”

To learn more about how Industry 4.0 can help enable the factory of the future, download the recent MCI report “How Industry 4.0 drives agility and productivity.”
Supply Chain Management
By Pat Dixon, PE, PMP

Vice President of Automation, Pulmac Systems International (pulmac.com)
&
Hannes Rosskopf

Principal Customer Success Manager North America, flexis (flexis.com/en)
Imagine you have a paper machine producing 50 different grades.

To ensure timely customer order fulfilment, you need to have the right grades in the right amounts in your warehouse, or the production capacity to produce those orders on your machine.

Each of those grades can require different raw material (e.g., hardwood, softwood, fillers, etc.) and equipment (e.g., coaters, refiners, etc). Some customer orders are periodic and predictable while others are urgent. Orders can vary in size. You also want those orders sequenced in production so that your grade changes are managed for minimum disruption; a small basis weight on uncoated sheet change is easier than a large one with coaters added.

As the number of grades produced and the orders filled on your paper machine has grown, there had been an exponentially growing challenge to optimize the sequencing of your 50 grades on the machine for cost and production efficiency. Additionally, the shareholders do not like it when too much capital is tied up in an inflated warehouse inventory, while on the other hand customers expect an on-time delivery of any order. How do you meet expectations and stay competitive?

To further complicate matters, what if there is a mechanical failure on your machine that will take you offline for an extended period? Are there other mills with the grades in their warehouses to meet orders scheduled for your machine? If not, are there other machines that are available and have capacity to fill your orders? How much time will it take you to shift orders? Will it be possible to re-schedule the production of the orders to minimize the impact on customer deliveries?

In the Industry 4.0 era, the vertical integration and realtime connectivity of processes (mainly corporate planning processes and execution) is the key. This connectivity creates visibility to all stakeholders, integrates advanced analytics and moves beyond traditional ERP systems which forces a collaboration between business and IT leaders to the benefits of customers, shareholders, production and planning staff, and other stakeholders. Automation at this level optimizes the utilization of your staffing and provides realtime responses to disruptions.

For example, an Asian car manufacturer allows the dealerships in the US to see the planned vehicle production and gives them the option to place orders against the production plan with any desired changes (e.g., red instead blue color) and provides the dealers real-time information on the impact of such a change.

The integration of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) with Supply Chain Management (SCM) allows the production facilities to have the required raw materials at the right time in inventory and deliver the cars to the right location as expected. Any disruption from raw material supply, equipment availability, or new rush orders is detected by the system. A new production schedule is automatically produced to meet objectives, which include cost-efficiency, facility capacity, and resource workload.

As our industry evolves and progresses, we will start to see more of this capability on all levels along corporate, production, and automation processes. The paper industry is on its way to extending realtime automation and optimization from the plant floor to the top of the enterprise. This will ensure that the 50 grades on your machine will be managed to meet orders from your customers and reward stakeholders.
Expanding UPS's
UPS's, or uninterruptible power supplies, have been around for a long time now. As time has passed, they have gotten larger and larger (as batteries have gotten less expensive).

I often use our home as a test lab, since both my wife and I operate our offices from here.

The issue here is keeping the computers and internet connections operating. Laura uses a laptop with docking station. I have a large workstation with a battery about the size of a motorcycle battery. It will give me up to an hour to shut down in a power loss situation.

Recently, after waiting almost eight months from the time of order, we installed an automatic whole house generator that kicks in within 30 seconds of a power failure. It runs on natural gas, so as long as we do not lose the gas supply, we should be covered. Can't help it if the internet goes down upstream, but within the house we can now keep the routers working.

The next step would be a complete whole house battery system, but I don't think those are at the right performance/price point just yet.

So, Jim, why are you telling us about your home system? I think mills and plants are following the same path. Electrical reliability seems to be going down, not up. Battery technology is getting better and less expensive. There will be an intersection of technology and economy within the next five to ten years making full plant UPS's, even in paper mills, attractive and adoptable. What those will look like will be anyone's guess, but the trend is clear.
What are cognitive networks?
Sean Kinney, Editor in Chief,
RCR Wireless News
As defined in the IEEE publication Xplore back in 2005, cognitive networks are comprised of elements that observe “network conditions and then, using prior knowledge gained from previous interactions with the network, plans, decides and acts on this information.” The goal is for the intelligence embedded in cognitive networks to look at the “end-to-end goals of a data flow,” effectively turning “the user’s end-to-end goals into a form understandable by the cognitive process.”
Tracking productivity in Industry 4.0 (in Construction)
By DOMINIC ELLIS
Industry 4.0, the phase in the Industrial Revolution that marries physical production and operations with smart digital technology and big data, is driving significant change in the traditional manufacturing landscape. Yet the construction sector remains one of the least digitised sectors of the economy, according to McKinsey. 
IoT legislation device manufacturers need to know about
By Farbod H. Foomany
The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020, signed into law in December of that year, requires government agencies to ensure the security of their IoT devices. Several states, including California and Oregon, have already passed IoT cybersecurity laws. This new act will have a much wider impact and affect how devices are manufactured across the board, since industry and other levels of government tend to follow federal security requirements.
A remedial approach to destructive IoT hacks
By Chris Rouland, CEO, Phosphorus Cybersecurity
As of this year, there are more than 10 billion active IoT devices all over the world, many of which are deployed in enterprises.

Keeping those devices secure is of the utmost importance, lest they be a way in for attackers, so it’s imperative that organizations institute IoT security practices that remediate vulnerabilities and better protect the network – by identifying and securing every “thing”. The main challenge lies in the fact that most companies aren’t aware of the spread of devices connected to its network.
Industree 4.0 is exclusively sponsored by SAP