In its journey of digital transformation to improve asset production quality, TRL Krosaki (previously, TATA Refractory Limited), one of India's largest refractory manufacturing companies, has witnessed higher levels of operational efficiency by adopting PTC Inc's Thingworx IoT platform for real-time monitoring, reducing manufacturing breakdowns significantly.
In September 2019, the refractory company joined hands with PTC Inc to pursue an accelerated path to realise industrial process transformation. PTC's Thingworx has enabled TRL to do real-time monitoring and give insights for Silica Tunnel Kiln (STK) along with wireless condition monitoring of its critical assets, such as fans and motors.
By leveraging the Thingworx, TRL has witnessed an almost 20% increase in productivity by eliminating logbooks and a 60% reduction in time to backtrack issues through digital workflow. Sharing details about the project, Kumar Heramba Narayan Naik, CIO, TRL Krosaki Refractories, said, "This project has opened the door to start our journey of Industry 4.0. We have improved our operational productivity significantly; additionally, the real-time operational visibility and asset performance have helped us reduce breakdowns significantly."
Initiatives lined up by the PTC'S Thingworx include smart factory solution to monitor kiln (furnace) operating conditions and performance of 50+ assets in the kiln area, wireless vibration and temperature monitoring for critical assets, like gas booster fans, to predict faults in advance, mobility solutions for operators digitising manual logbooks capturing production data using industrial tablets and workflow automation and deviation analysis of kiln temperature profile across various zones to ensure adherence to product quality metrics.
Dhirendra Kulkarni, Senior Director - Solution Consulting Group, PTC, said, "TRL Krosaki has kickstarted a digital transformation journey for the company to improve operational efficiency at its Odissa manufacturing plant for next couple of years. Leveraging PTC's industrial IoT solution they have implemented condition monitoring of their key assets e.g Silica Tunnel Kiln (STK), fans, motors, etc. to improve brick quality, reduce downtime & improve worker productivity.
TRL has successfully also converted some of its old assets to smart assets to get real-time information. As part of the second phase, it plans to leverage the power of Thingworx for prediction and recommendation models and expand its scope to other kilns in our factory.
TRL expects to see further improvement in brick quality by monitoring temperature profiles across the zones. It has already enabled proactive visibility into asset health to reduce breakdowns and helped planned changeovers to ensure consistent production.
