Challenge
With production data trapped in siloes, China International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd. (CIMC) – a world leading supplier of logistics and energy equipment – was faced with productivity issues from unplanned machine downtime and lack of operational visibility to reduce energy consumption and improve quality. CIMC needed to build an IIoT foundation to accelerate digital transformation across their enterprise and make the smart connected factory a reality.
Solution
Partnering with PTC and Microsoft, CIMC launched a smart manufacturing initiative at their Qingdao and Ruijiang factories – leveraging Microsoft Azure IoT and the ThingWorx Industrial IoT platform – to integrate IoT with their Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and break down data siloes. By visualizing operational data throughout the entire manufacturing process with ThingWorx, CIMC can monitor production performance in real time to enable predictive maintenance, manage energy consumption, and trace quality. Through gaining actionable insights and a better understanding of machine behavior across the shop floor, they are now able to comprehensively optimize production.
“We started to generate actionable insights with the improved visibility into our machinery. Meanwhile finding that we could duplicate the same capabilities in our factories quickly…it’s a great exploration to digitalize all data across the entire manufacturing process.”
- Jinjie Pan, CIO, CIMC
Results
(in two initial plant deployments)Time to value within months of go-live: CIMC
- Reduced WIP by 16%
- Reduced unplanned downtime by 30%
- Reduced energy consumption by 13.2%
- Reduced manufacturing cycle time by 16-20%
Jinjie Pan, CIO, CIMC