Plastics & Rubber World - September/October 2019 - 12

INDUSTRY 4.0

Technology adaptation
Industry 4.0 oﬀers
opportunities to maximise
eﬃciencies by eliminating
waste. In this series of
articles Julian Buckley
speaks with a systems
provider, a moulding
machine maker and a
rubber part manufacturer
to uncover how the
technologies can and have
been leveraged to improve
manufacturing performance
Video installation at HPE performs
quality checks on new products

Industry has basically run
out of things to squeeze
Tripp Partain, Hewlett Packard
Enterprise

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here is a widely-held perception that
investing in systems to support Industry 4.0 requires a considerable
amount of cash. But this is far from accurate, according to Tripp Partain, CTO Converged Servers, Edge and IoT Systems, at
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
"I was visiting a company, one of the
largest producers of automotive ﬁlters in
the world. We were watching a line where
the ﬁlters are being wrapped and suddenly, the ﬁlters are coming out with no
wrappers.
"The line stopped and calls were made
to locate the guy in charge of the cell. It
took more than two hours for him to get
back and complete the ﬁve-minute job to
replace the cellophane roll and feed it into
the machine."
Partain says that ﬁtting a very basic
sensor could warn the operator, perhaps
by text message, when there's 10% left on
the cellophane roll. Based on that alert,
the operator could be in place to insert
a new roll as the old one runs out, keeping the line productive and, importantly,
keeping the revenue stream ﬂowing.
It's a case of basic technology being put
to best use, explains Partain: "The question then becomes how many minutes in
a year is that machine down. You could
spend a very small amount of money solving that one problem and eliminate 20 or
30 hours of downtime in a year."
In some cases it may not be a machine
which is causing issues, but a wider element of the production chain. "Radio frequency identiﬁcation [RFID] tags used to
be expensive, but they're so cheap now
you can add one to every manufactured
part and have an instant, accurate picture
of your stock," says Partain.
Or in another, related application, tools
could be marked so their whereabouts

can be traced. This prevents loss, or even
time to ﬁnd the appropriate item, all of
which can be considered waste.

BACKGROUND OF INDUSTRY 4.0

Since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers have been ﬁnding ways to maximise the eﬃciency of their production
processes. Whether that was tied to labour or machine capacity, the solutions
we largely based on physical routes to
achieving incremental gains across the
factory ﬂoor.
But according to Tripp Partain, it was
around the turn of this century that this
incremental improvement curve started
to drop oﬀ. "Better process, new material, new techniques to eliminate waste,
all those things really stalled out in the
mid-2000s. That was across the board.
Industry has basically run out of things to
squeeze," he says.
This, he continues, is where Industry
4.0 comes in. Largely driven by technology developed for the consumer market,
companies have developed hardware and
software that supports analysis of data
captured from single machines or whole
factory ﬂoors. In turn, this delivers insight
into new areas in which to make process
gains.
"Looking back, the government, military, or NASA might make a discovery
and that would ultimately ﬁlter down to
where an adapted version of the tech
would be made available on a commercial basis," says Partain. He points to material developments, improved power
transmission and ultimately the internet
as examples.
But it was the development of the
smart phone which gave rise to what is
now known as Industry 4.0. "A lot of new
tech has been developed directly for the

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Plastics & Rubber World - September/October 2019

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