Case Study Archives

December 19, 2024December 19, 2024

From Vision to Reality: Transforming Manufacturing with Brabo MES

Redefining Excellence – The Tangible Triumphs of Brabo Integration

Client Profile

A vanguard in the carbon black manufacturing industry, part of a renowned group with a history of over six decades of industrial leadership, has initiated a groundbreaking venture to integrate the Brabo Platform into its expansive operations at its Greenfield plant. This strategic manoeuvre is meticulously designed to augment its production efficiency, refine product traceability, and harness the power of data analytics for enhanced decision-making capabilities.

This plant, being the largest among its facilities, is set to become its first fully integrated Smart Factory and a benchmark for subsequent enterprise-wide deployment

Aiming High: Strategic Milestones with Brabo MES

Enhanced Efficiency: Streamlined workflows reduce redundancies and empower operators.
Error-Free Execution: Real-time validations ensure flawless inventory and material management.
Data-Driven Decisions: KPI analytics and dashboards provide actionable insights for every stakeholder.

Core Technologies and Features

Real-Time Workflow Coordination: Simplifies tasks, ensuring consistency across shifts and teams.
Barcode Inventory Management: Error-proof systems for material tracking and traceability.
KPI Analytics Engine: Provides actionable insights, empowering teams to adapt quickly.
Dashboards and Alerts: Centralized visibility for proactive decision-making.

Horizons Expanded: Navigating the Future with Brabo MES

The scalability of Brabo ensures that this journey is but the first chapter in a saga of innovation and evolution.

The collaboration with Brabo MES is setting the stage for future advancements, creating smarter, more efficient plants across the enterprise.

Start Your Digital Transformation Journey today!

February 1, 2024December 19, 2024

Advancing Operational Excellence in the Rubber Chemical Sector

Brabo’s Role in Realizing Business Goals

Brabo’s introduction marked a turning point in manufacturing operations:

Client Profile

A leader in the rubber chemicals sector with a distinguished legacy spanning over four decades has solidified its position as a benchmark of technical prowess and client-focused services in the chemical industry. Celebrated for supplying high-quality products on a global scale, this prominent manufacturer in India has carved out a significant market share in the Rubber Chemicals sector, thereby establishing the industry standard.

With its state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities and a steadfast commitment to green chemistry, its operations epitomize manufacturing excellence, extending its prestigious export footprint across continents.

Their Digital Transformation journey, initiated with the integration of Solulever’s Brabo Factory Cloud Platform, represents not merely an upgrade but a foundational shift in their operational ethos.

Business Objectives

Challenges: The company had set steep improvement objectives in the area of “Critical Equipment Efficiency”. The existing setups did not allow the company to have real-time visibility into important operational variables like energy consumption. Further, there was a burning need for equipment monitoring, data-driven decision-making, and proactive asset management around critical shop-floor equipment.

Objectives: Brabo was introduced to meet these business objectives. The program’s objectives focused on real-time efficiency monitoring, comprehensive parameter monitoring, and implementing advanced control mechanics. The goal was set to drive towards better streamlined, more efficient, and more sustainable manufacturing operations.

Digitalization Journey Objectives

Efficiently addressing these critical business objectives, the program marked significant milestones:

Critical Equipment Inefficiency: A lack of insight into fuel consumption, heat derivations, and combustion efficiency led to heightened energy consumption and emissions, undermining operational reliability.
Enhancement of Real-Time Analysis: The lack of real-time data impeded proactive decision-making, resulting in environmental, energy, and cost inefficiencies.
Heat Loss Calculations: Without precise calculations, they grappled with increased fuel consumption and process variability, impacting overall energy efficiency and process reliability.
Legacy Operational Resilience: The absence of data-driven sustainability initiatives led to inefficient resource utilization, hindering their growth and innovation potential.

Business Impact

Brabo’s implementation led to transformative changes:

Reduced Downtime and Breakdowns: Brabo’s intelligence led to a significant reduction in equipment downtime and breakdowns, enhancing overall productivity.
Improved Efficiency and Maintenance Cost Reduction: The platform’s insights contribute to improved operational efficiency and lower maintenance costs.
Operational Transparency and Enhanced Decision-Making: With Brabo, decision-making is now more data-driven, leading to increased operational transparency and efficiency.
Strategic Benchmarking: Establishing benchmarks for efficiency and tracking progress over time.
Data-Driven Excellence: Brabo has empowered them with deeper operational transparency and data-driven decision-making, further enhancing efficiency and strategic clarity.
Energy Savings: The platform’s monitoring and control capabilities led to more efficient operations, reducing energy consumption and fuel costs.

Future Roadmap

Looking ahead, this collaborative partnership with Brabo is set to expand:

This partnership with Brabo symbolizes a significant stride towards a future where digital innovation is synonymous with operational excellence, environmental responsibility, and enhanced safety. This journey is not just a story of technological adoption but a blueprint for the future of the manufacturing industry.

Transform Your Manufacturing Landscape with Brabo: Ready to redefine your manufacturing operations? Discover how Brabo can tailor a digital solution for your unique challenges. Join the league of innovators and propel your business into a future of efficiency and growth.

Start Your Digital Transformation Journey today!

February 1, 2024February 14, 2024

Elevating Manufacturing Efficiency through Digital Transformation

Global Agrochemical Excellence: Unveiling Our Client’s Profile

Our client stands as India’s premier agrochemical company, holding a distinguished position as the fifth-ranked global player in the field, with a presence spanning over 138 countries. As a pioneer in the realm of global food systems, the client’s integrated portfolio encompasses patented and post-patent agricultural solutions for diverse arable and specialty crops. These solutions span the entire crop value chain, covering biological, crop protection, seed treatment, and post-harvest segments. With market access to 90% of the world’s food production, our client’s mission revolves around fostering growth and advancement across the entire agricultural value chain, including growers, distributors, suppliers, and innovation partners.

Digital transformation emerged as the linchpin to expedited progress, promising to unlock new levels of efficiency through the judicious exploitation of process and equipment data.

Innovative Solutions for Smart Manufacturing

Solulever, a Dutch tech startup, partnered with a client to implement digital transformation via Brabo, a cutting-edge European manufacturing connectivity and intelligence platform.

Solulever’s strategy involved a dual-layer integration with Brabo. On the business layer, Brabo connected with the client’s SAP ERP, integrating key data like production planning and batch details. At the control layer, Brabo integrated with equipment using an OT adapter framework that supports various protocols, enhancing the Filling & Packaging line’s efficiency.

Brabo’s capabilities enabled comprehensive data collection, analysis, and process automation. This included monitoring assets and production in real time, managing KPIs, automating downtime analysis, and enhancing operational efficiency with GUI-driven asset modelling for precise equipment and process oversight.

Additionally, Brabo’s advanced analytics, predictive maintenance, and condition-based monitoring tools promised significant improvements in product quality and operational cost optimization, marking a leap towards smart manufacturing excellence.

From Vision to Reality: Measuring Success in Smart Manufacturing

The collaboration between Brabo and our esteemed client’s manufacturing units has yielded exceptional outcomes. Through the implementation of the cutting-edge Industry 4.0 platform, our client has experienced a significant transformation in their operational efficiency and productivity.

The following Key Impacts of Brabo’s Digital Transformation were observed:

Comprehensive Shop Floor Visibility: Integrated Brabo’s Process Twin Suite and SCADA Visualizer for total operational oversight, transitioning from manual to a paperless environment.
Digital Shop Floor Transition: Utilized Brabo’s Connected Worker Solutions for digital checklists, e-logbooks, and live KPI dashboards, enhancing productivity and reducing labor costs.
Streamlined and Efficient Operations: Achieved highly streamlined operations through digital transformation, significantly enhancing operational efficiency.
Proactive Issue Identification: Leveraged real-time alerts and notifications to minimize unplanned downtimes and ensure asset availability.
Reduced Emergency Repairs: Continuous asset and operation monitoring led to fewer emergency repairs and disruptions.
Optimized Production Processes: Enabled process optimization, cutting down on scrap and rework, thereby increasing production yield.
Improved Product Quality: Enhanced product quality, reinforcing the client’s industry reputation for excellence.

Brabo’s integration has undeniably revolutionized our client’s manufacturing landscape, paving the way for smarter, more efficient operations. With a continued focus on innovation and technical expertise, our client remains committed to delivering exceptional products that inspire confidence and trust in their customers.

January 24, 2024February 21, 2024

Industry 4.0 Springboard for Chemical Manufacturers

OVERVIEW –

The chemical industry has been a relative laggard in adopting the digital transformation agenda. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a driving force behind boosting this adoption compared to many other sectors. At the moment, we find a broad spectrum of maturity levels of Digital Transformation in the Chemical space, based on the size, market, and technology landscape of different enterprises. Discussions with chemical industry experts reveal the top limiting factors for the rapid adoption of digital technologies. Solulever, a Dutch technology startup, aims to eliminate these limitations for the chemical sector by providing a well-suited & innovative software platform called Brabo.

INDUSTRY CHALLENGES

The chemical industry is at an inflection point in utilizing digital and IIoT technologies to drive higher connectivity, efficiency, and competitive differentiation. In recent discussions with some of the executives of the chemical manufacturers, we figured out the main business benefits targeted and the top impediments they faced in adopting these technologies. The business challenges targeted towards the adoption of Industry 4.0 are multi-faceted. From complex supply chains to erratic demand patterns to sustainability and regulation pressures, there are several dimensions of business challenges that the fourth industrial revolution addresses.

Some of these include :

With the current methods & technologies, there is generally a lack of end-to-end visibility and transparency of the operations on the shop floor. With the traditional siloed operations model, it is uncommon to find an interconnected view of manufacturing processes in totality. This limits the ability of a manufacturer to drive holistic optimization or improvement initiatives.
One of the significant drawbacks is the low operational performance resulting from the underutilization of assets. The data produced by the shop-floor equipment is voluminous. However, it is generally not used effectively to identify actual run times, time spent in breakdowns, and repairs. Digitization of the assets helps increase overall productivity by identifying these gaps in the operations, helping eliminate them, and maximizing the utilization.
It is generally observed that the potential of quality-linked optimization is underutilized. Manufacturers lose the opportunity for quality-linked cost-optimization since there is a disconnect between quality measurement, quality improvement, and material insight systems.
The aging workforce and the need to capture their tacit knowledge is more important now than ever before. At the same time, the digitally-savvy next generation of operators expects digitally advanced knowledge and operation systems. However, with a disconnect in the tech landscape, operators are introduced to many systems for different operation parts. It leads to an ever-rising learning curve and thus considerable resistance from the workforce to the frequent changes in their use of technology.
The majority of companies still operate on paper-based systems. The accuracy of the data captured in these systems has always been a question. This limits the ability of manufacturing executives to make informed decisions and drive improvements. Further, the traditional ways of scheduling maintenance on the shop floor restrict manufacturers’ ability to transition to predictive and prescriptive maintenance models.

SOLUTION

So far, the digitization of manufacturing operations needed to overcome these pressing industry challenges has been a complex affair. Multiple layers of the technologies are required to connect shop-floor and IT systems, create meaningful insights, stream the insights at speed, and make the needed business impact. Solulever has taken upon itself the challenge to simplify this somewhat complex, long-winded, and expensive affair.

Its newest development, called Brabo, manufacturing connectivity & intelligence software platform, is a single-stop solution that is fast being adopted by the leading Chemical Manufacturing enterprises. Brabo is one of the most comprehensive, flexible, and scalable platforms carefully architected to make manufacturing operations digitizing simple, fast, affordable, and fun!

Recently, the company delivered the edge variant of Brabo, called Brabo Edge Platform, to a prominent chemical manufacturing enterprise in Europe. Without needing expensive middleware or unique interfaces, this holistic platform is integrated into all the customer’s technology layers, including PLCs, DCSs, MES applications, ERP, and other IT systems.Brabo can read and interpret data coming from the shop-floor equipment of varying make and age with its multi-protocol support. Brabo now acts as an integrated system of manufacturing intelligence that the customer is using in the direction of Asset Utilization, Material Efficiency, Process Control, and OT Service Management. Brabo’s real-time data streaming capabilities bring real-time actions for operators to take corrective and preventive measures during manufacturing operations.As an added benefit, Brabo provides a drag-and-drop canvas for its customer to build, configure and visualize an advanced SCADA system – replacing the need for a third-party SCADA system. Brabo also comes bundled with its implementation of Historian, with a historian-to-historian replication functionality.Therefore Brabo acts as a single source of production data for all of the production reporting and dashboarding needs of the customer. With the ability to ingest up to 1 million data points per second, Brabo is at ease to handle the large data volumes in the large plant implementation for the customer. Starting with the Asset Utilization and OT Service Management use-cases, Solulever is working with the customer in bringing tangible business benefits in short sprints.

The platform is built 100% on microservices and open integration architecture. The benefit of GUI-driven low-code development is that creating new use-cases is a straightforward and fast process. The following 12-months roadmap includes use cases in Process Control, Material Efficient, and Quality Improvement.

KEY TAKEAWAY

The benefits of Digital Manufacturing for the Chemical industry are multi-faced in the direction of reducing manufacturing costs, improvement of asset utilization, quality improvement, operator enablement, and sustainability. Wide-scale adoption of this critical chapter of Industry 4.0 has been limited because of the associated solutions’ cost, complexity, inflexibility, and non-scalability. With the new wave of comprehensive, open-integration, and modern architecture-based software platforms, the situation is changing. Leaders in the chemical industry are fast adopting Brabo, a revolutionary platform for manufacturing connectivity & intelligence. Brabo is purpose-built to make the Digitization of Manufacturing operations simple, fast, affordable, and fun. Particularly for the Chemical Industry, Brabo is architected to deal with the various tech landscapes encountered. It is built to handle the large volumes expected & speed needed and is comprehensive to impact all relevant production KPIs. Also, it is flexible to be adopted across the enterprise and is scalable to justify the ROI irrespective of a plant’s size & profitability.

For more on Brabo, please reach info@solulever.com