Fusion Data Hub enables Davey Textile to make data-driven decisions and catch lapses in loom activity, increasing productivity.
Background
Davey Textile has been offering textile solutions since 1986 through their manufacturing facility and warehouse located in Edmonton, Alberta, as well as a distribution warehouse in Houston, Texas. Davey’s looms produce all their textile solutions, including neon reflective fabrics used for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Their motto — “don’t just be seen, be safe” — guides their creation of premier products committed to quality and service.
Challenges
Davey Textile was experiencing issues with data collection and automation, including manual data collection, inaccurate detection, and the recording of downtime events. Limited data availability, access, analysis, and lack of collaboration left decision-makers reliant on a “gut feel” rather than data-backed visibility into production. For Davey to set targets in production capacity and equipment utilization and clear its capacity bottlenecks, it needed visibility into loom monitoring and downtime data.
Solutions
With Fusion, Davey now has clear-sighted control over loom monitoring and downtime data with its 25 assets.
Fusion automatically collects and displays all loom status changes in real-time, aggregating and transmitting production counter values on a minute interval per loom. When a loom experiences downtime, operators receive a notification and can input reason codes such as scheduled maintenance or inventory planning. Operators can then create a comprehensive PowerBI report to analyze the data and compare performance by loom and product SKU.
Davey also deployed Fusion to match the data models of the looms. Fusion worked with Davey to install custom-manufactured IoT data collection devices for each of the looms. Once extracted and collected from on-premise systems, the devices fed the downtime and production monitoring data to Microsoft Azure for further analysis and reporting in Fusion.
Fusion provides data connectivity to different endpoints for the ingestion and integration of operational technology data. It then extracts the data from on-premise operational systems and moves it to the cloud.
Fusion then manages operational data in Microsoft Azure, organizing the data for consumption by different stakeholders. Access to the data is provided in an open format for orchestration, visualization, analytics and reporting.
We’re now better able to monitor and limit unplanned downtime. With the Fusion solution, we have improved our on-time performance against our manufacturing schedule and enhanced our overall operating efficiency by 100%.
Dan King
Vice President, Production and R&D, Davey Textile Solutions
Applications
Davey Textile uses Fusion to increase uptime and gain a data-backed view into production capacity and variation, catching and correcting downtime quickly. Davey is now able to cost-effectively adjust production capacity to changes in customer demands. With their production and downtime monitoring data securely stored and accessible in Microsoft Azure, Davey can automate reporting for further data-backed initiatives.
Benefits
Fusion enabled Davey Textile to achieve their goals through:
- Increasing downtime visibility, availability, asset utilization, and efficiencies
- Eliminating bottlenecks and root causes of downtime events
- Predicting and reducing unplanned downtime to maximize output and profit
- Improving and simplifying communication using a single and standardized source for downtime and production reports
- Creating reports for machine performance to highlight the impact of operation improvements
