Enabling Preventive Maintenance for a Global Steel Manufacturer
Challenges
A global leader in steel production was looking to shift from reactive to preventive maintenance.
With the overarching goals of improving efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing safety, they partnered with Searce to establish a centralized data warehouse for aggregating plant data generated by sensors and creating visualizations to monitor and identify potential equipment malfunctions at an early stage. Going from reactive to predictive maintenance would empower them to intervene promptly and prevent costly production disruptions.
- Minimizing Latency During Data Ingestion: The system needed to ingest massive amounts of high-velocity sensor data with minimal latency (~5-8 seconds) from multiple plants, ensuring no data was lost in the process.
- Data Correlation: Correlating data from on-site edge devices with the centralized data warehouse was crucial for effective monitoring and alerting, a challenge compounded by the varied protocols used by edge devices for data collection.
- Real-Time Monitoring and Alerting: Creating a real-time monitoring and alerting system based on sensor data analysis was vital to their predictive maintenance efforts.
Searce Solution
True to our commitment to delivering intelligent, impactful, futuristic outcomes for our clients we implemented an innovative solution powered by Google Cloud:
- Deployment of 10,000 Tags to Manufacturing Connect Edge (MCE): Installed MCE Internet of Things (IoT) devices at the client’s plants to collect data from 10,000 sensor tags.
- Data Warehouse on Google Cloud: Set up a scalable data warehouse using BigQuery for real-time data streaming from MCE devices.
- Data Pipelines with Dataflow: Developed efficient data pipelines using Dataflow to ingest data from Kafka into BigQuery staging tables, stream MCE logs, and collect edge device connection data, all while creating a centralized operations dashboard using Cloud Functions.
- Dynamic Stored Procedure: Implemented a dynamic stored procedure for automatically segregating plant-wise data into datasets and tables.
- Monitoring and Alerting: Configured robust monitoring and alerting mechanisms for data pipelines to ensure continuous and reliable operations.
- Intuitive Dashboards: Developed user-friendly dashboards using Looker Studio to visualize data and critical business KPIs, empowering data-driven decision-making.
Business Impact
Our innovative solution delivered transformative business impact for the client:
- Enabled Real-time Insights: Provided real-time access to streaming machine sensor data, enabling timely decision-making.
- Improved Plant Operations: Real-time detection of trends and anomalies across various parameters (noise, vibration, temperature, flicker, etc.) significantly enhanced operational efficiency.
- Established Predictive Maintenance: The ability to proactively identify potential equipment failures revolutionized maintenance practices, reduced downtime, enhanced inventory management, and optimized production processes and maintenance schedules.
- Enhanced Data Quality: Cleaned and standardized data improved overall data quality across the organization enabling more informed decision-making.
- Reduced Costs: Reduced data storage and processing costs, freeing up IT resources for other critical tasks.
- Ensured Future Readiness: Our solution helped futurify the client and laid the ground for other use cases such as centralized management & reporting, machine learning and statistical functions, and adopting data modeling and digital twins.
The Searce Edge
Our commitment to being a Trusted Partner was evident throughout this journey:
- Consultation: Providing expert guidance on Google Cloud technology selection and implementation.
- Training: Empowering their teams with the skills to manage the solution independently.
- Innovation: Developing a dynamic stored procedure to automate data segregation.
Google Cloud and Searce’s EVLOS problem-solving approach helped the client successfully transition to predictive maintenance, gaining real-time insights into plant operations, improving efficiency, and reducing costs. This solution exemplifies the power of technology to drive innovation and transformation in the manufacturing industry.
Location: India
Industry: Manufacturing (Steel)
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