Fillers' Monitoring: Evolution Through MaSH

Fillers’ monitoring is one of the key components to ensure reliable machines and to meet production goals.

In today's marketplace, even companies with medium production volumes - up to 7 million cartons/year - need to plan packaging and delivery in a precise and dependable way.

This is even more true for big food manufacturers operating with tight production schedules, for whom machine downtimes can cause significant financial losses and also harm the company's image.

Considering the extent to which the fillers' efficiency affects line production performances and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), Galdi has been developing a fillers' monitoring system, called MaSH (Machine System Health), since the end of 2017, which aims at:

• offering a detailed view of the machine's efficiency
• anticipating and preventing downtimes
• providing detailed production data
• improving the work of operators and maintenance technicians

It may sound futuristic, but it isn't; actually, for some time now, our clients, like Greenfields Indonesia, have been using MaSH, which can be activated on all RG50 and RG270 food filling machines.

MaSH is an IoT project which uses the machine's sensors to monitor in detail the efficiency of filling machines.

The system processes the machine/s' production data and translates them - through a cloud-based platform - into a useful language for machine operators.

System designers based their work on the needs of production managers, operators and maintenance technicians, selecting the most relevant and useful information for their work.

To make MaSH even easier to use in daily work activities, the system is:

• Equipped with a user-friendly interface
• Safely accessible from any device: PC, smartphone, tablet
• Integrated with management systems (ERP, MES, PLMS, CRM).

MaSH's interface has been designed to offer utmost clarity and a global view on production trends.

You can see at a glance both the - hourly, daily and weekly - performance levels and the relevant MME (Machine Mechanical Efficiency) percentages.

Then you can get more details, checking specific areas:

MACHINE'S OPERATING TIME – with a focus on:

• Performance trend and comparison of different days
• Hours needed for cleaning cycles
• Downtime caused by filler's malfunctioning
• Machine downtimes prompted by the operator
• MME details
• Manufactured packs

CARTON PRODUCTION – with a focus on:

• cartons/hour
• total number of cartons
• discarded packages

ALARMS – with a focus on:

• most relevant indicators
• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure)
• MTTR (Mean Time To Restore)

Monitoring the filler "from above and in detail" enables the person in charge to better understand the machine and production indexes over time, in view of a continuous enhancement of packaging processes.

With the data obtained from MaSH, we can:

• Identify lower production times and figure out the causes
• Improve the efficiency of both packaging machines and operators, when there are significant differences between shifts.

Furthermore, weekly reports provide a summary of the most significant production data, which can be easily shared via a link and used when presenting results.

For many clients, managing autonomously the maintenance of the packaging machine, wherever possible, is of paramount importance.

To reach this objective, anyone, including non experts, who operates the filler, needs to understand its functioning and get the most of the information shared by the machine.

The MaSH system was explicitly conceived to simplify the work of:

OPERATORS

The real revolution brought about by MaSH is the possibility to anticipate the filler's downtimes, flagging a potential malfunctioning before the operator is able to detect it.

The sheer number of alarms operators get often leads them to ignore them. The consequence is that the problem is detected when it's too late. With MaSH, however, the system itself selects and transmits the anomalies of the packaging machine.

SERVICE TECHNICIANS

In order to reduce downtimes and especially the MTTR, maintenance staff must be able to identify as soon as possible the problem causing the fillers' potential malfunctioning. To simplify the troubleshooting of most complex cases, MaSH provides access to the alarm timeline, highlighting recurring warnings.

However, as mentioned above, the system is designed to prevent the problems affecting fillers: if, through the real-time monitoring data analysis, sensors notice a repetitive alarm or a loss of performance in a specific area, MaSH sends a push notification to the maintenance technician, enabling him to perform the necessary checks before the problem occurs.

REMOTE ASSISTANCE

Where Help Desk support is required, MaSH helps considerably speed up the work of technicians, both in the troubleshooting and problem-finding stages. For an even faster response, you can also rely on remote video-assistance using the TYE service (Through Your Eyes).

And, if you are not yet convinced, discover three additional reasons why you should use the advanced monitoring system for your filling machine.