Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 11

41 Continued on next page MAKING YOUR INSTALLATION ASUCCESS Foundries in the USA have been slow to adapt to robotics and advanced automation. Imagine a foundry with IIoT using robots, drones, voice powered artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality solutions to increase safety, quality, productivity, and bottom line results. IIoT could allow a foundry to operate with no unscheduled downtime, in other words no BREAKDOWNS. How do we achieve no unscheduled down time? In the past all foundries used reactive maintenance. Run a piece of foundry equipment until it stops then repair it. We still see this in high volume automotive foundries today when JIT suppliers cannot take the time to do preventive maintenance and must react when a machine fails. IIoT will change the way foundries do maintenance by moving from reactive/preventive/predictive maintenance to prescriptive maintenance (RxM). RxM will allow analytics to show that a piece of equipment is headed for trouble and prescribe prioritized, pre-determined, expert driven mitigation or repair. Foundries will have to abandon their old habits such as reactive/preventive maintenance and be prepared to act on detailed information that predicts machine failure. Will Goetz’s (Emerson) Reliability Value Chain illustrates how the foundry manager can fit all the pieces together to achieve zero breakdowns, continuous improvement, and RxM. The foundry manager must see the entire casting process holistically. From the value chain there are four categories: obtaining accurate data, translating the data into information, gleaning knowledge from the information, and developing an action plan from the knowledge gleaned. The value chain illustrates how sensors on smart foundry equipment are used to monitor the causes for a machine to no longer contribute to the process. In other words, failure does not mean that the machine stops working, it means that it is not contributing to the process as designed. Condition monitoring and predictive technology can detect when the machine is not performing within specified parameters giving the foundry manager time to take action. Foundry managers can move their foundry to PdM and prepare for RxM and for the adoption of IIoT by doing three simple things. • Prepare the foundry to be proactive