Digitization of the plant: a look from the front

How close are Russian and global enterprises to industry standards 4.0? How is the process of digitalization and at what stage are we now? This was told to us by the representative of the company " Tsifra " Vasily Churanov . Their dispatcher system is already used by 120 Russian plants.

Under the cut - the most interesting and important excerpts from our conversation.

Vasily Churanov will take part in the discussion “Industrial Internet of Things: Industry 4.0” at the conference on September 25 .
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What should be the plant in industry 4.0

Ideally, production should work without human intervention. Only then maximum efficiency is achieved: when people are not involved, the equipment operates in three shifts 24 hours a day. There are such plants, and in them there are workshops that work in complete darkness. For example, the production of Philips razors in the Netherlands is located in a dark room where there are 128 robots.

Another important point for industry 4.0 is building mass production for individual orders. Instead of stamping a huge amount of the same product - a large number of products for individual customers. Such a plant is in Harley-Davidson, they collect motorcycles. The plant reduced the average time of production of motorcycles under the order from 28 days to 16 hours.

The transition to such technologies took about 10 years. Now, if we build production from scratch, everything can be done quite quickly, in a few years: there is already equipment, there is technology and an understanding of how to do it.

But neither the United States nor Europe did not fully switch to the principles of industry 4.0. You can not even talk about a significant transition. In many cases, there is no autonomous production, and it cannot be said that it is much more efficient than in Russia. Although yes, there are separate factories and separate areas that are built super modern.

MDC system as the first step to the industrial Internet of things

Our system, AIS "Dispatcher", is a system of the MDC (machine data collection) class. This is the lowest level when information about its operation and condition is collected from the equipment: how many machines worked, how many were idle, causes of downtime, additional information — current, power, power consumption, vibration. On the basis of these “big data”, production analytics is formed and various management decisions can be made.

Solving the problem of production control, enterprises are taking the first step in industry 4.0, where the main component is the industrial Internet of things. Introducing a monitoring system, enterprises form an environment where machines begin to understand their surroundings and communicate with each other using an Internet protocol, bypassing operators, independently solving issues of increasing efficiency or preventing emergency situations.

According to our estimates, there are about 400 thousand machine tools in Russia, and 6-7% of this equipment uses MDC systems. The amount of unconnected equipment is still very large and there is still a lot of work.


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70% of the machines in the factories are old

Every Russian plant has a large fleet of old equipment. If we talk in percentage terms, then about 70% of the machine park of Russia are old machines, which are already several decades old. The uniqueness of our system is that we can connect both new CNC equipment and old machines. To do this, we produce special terminals that are installed in the electrical cabinet of the machine. We connect the terminal to electro-automatics and all kinds of sensors, and we are already collecting the necessary data from them.

Old equipment in factories can be both universal and highly specialized. Presses, furnaces, turning and milling machines - it could be anything. Each plant has its own legacy of Soviet times, and each uses this equipment as it can. If these machines are specialized and rare, they are often a “bottleneck” in production. They need to be controlled first of all, to look at how efficiently they work, how much they are loaded - because the production speed equals the speed of the “narrow link” on it.

About the device of the MDC-system on the example of the "Dispatcher" system

The base component is the monitoring module, MDC module. It allows you to collect information from equipment in production. In the same module there is a dispatching unit, it is responsible for the reaction to various events within the system.

On top of this there are modules that help to more efficiently organize the production itself. The module "Production Control" allows you to write out shift tasks, control technological and organizational parameters of operators. The module "Management of downtime" (in fact, this module MRO, maintenance and repair) allows you to organize repairs on the condition, on time and on schedule. Another module is program management for CNC machines. New module - “Vibration Diagnostics”. Based on machine vibration monitoring data, the system tells you when and which of the critical machine nodes can fail, provides information on the technical condition of the bearings on the machines.

The customer, depending on his tasks, selects the necessary modules. The system can be integrated with systems of a higher level - production systems, ERP (enterprise resource management systems).

120 enterprises are now connected to our system. We received the first order about 6 years ago from the Smolensk Aviation Plant. There are now connected more than 70 pieces of equipment. In general, there are much more machines there, but these figures are classified information.


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Implementation at the enterprise

Implementation takes place in several stages. First, a pilot project is made, then a workshop is equipped. When an enterprise realizes that it can improve efficiency with this system, it decides on implementation throughout the plant. The next stage is equipment at the holding level, so that management from the management company can see the load by enterprise.

To equip the area of ​​10 machines, you need 2-3 working days. To equip an enterprise with 100-150 machines, it takes about a month.

Modern CNC machines, which can be connected via LAN, are equipped in 10-20 minutes. Complex (old) machines - in a couple of hours.


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Workers resist

Unfortunately, resistance was initially observed in almost all plants. People do not really want to change the usual way. If earlier it was necessary for them to just sit down to work and, at the end of the shift, hand over some reports, now they are asked to additionally enter information, press buttons on the terminals.

The second reason is that shop floor workers begin to understand that everything is monitored and every minute of unreasonable downtime falls on their shoulders. Often this causes a boycott by the staff and the introduction of incorrect information into the system. But after about a month, everything falls into place, because the “black box” becomes a “transparent aquarium”, and any action of the operator who tries to bring the system out of balance is monitored and subsequently disassembled in the planning meetings. These meetings are organized regularly at the stage of running in the system.

After six months or a year, the psychology of workers is changing: they begin to understand that everything is controlled, it is more profitable to work honestly, according to the rules, and receive all the privileges from managers.

In traditional industries in Russia, the workload of machine tools does not exceed 30-50%

We judge this by the fact that more than 5 thousand machines have already been included in the system. Some clients give us access to help understand the situation, and we see great potential for efficiency gains. The optimal load is 70%.

Some companies where we work, reach 60 percent load, including through the use of our system. For example, the holding company "Helicopters of Russia" seriously undertook to increase the efficiency of existing resources. And so, we have clients from most large corporations: UAC, Rosatom, KTRV, and others.

There are few private customers.

There are few requests from private factories, mostly requests come from state-owned enterprises. I attribute this to the fact that in large enterprises with a large amount of equipment, the economic effect, even if the efficiency of equipment loading is raised by 5-10%, is very significant. It is much more than at the enterprise with 10-15 machines. But everything changes. When people start to struggle for efficiency increase not for tens, but for a couple of percent, then small productions will come to the conclusion that it is necessary to count every minute of the machine’s work.



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