ARCO

Costruzioni Meccaniche Sottoriva

company name

Costruzioni Meccaniche Sottoriva

project title

ARCO

dimension and localization

Medium enterprise, Veneto

partner

ARCO

Politecnico di Milano

competencies

IoT smart connected product
Smart maintenance

The problem

Costruzioni Meccaniche Sottoriva S.p.A. produces a wide range of machines, ovens and complete systems for bakeries, pastry shops, pizzerias and confectionery industries.

The bakery sector, made up of both artisanal and industrial companies, is therefore very heterogeneous from the point of view of digitization. In the industrial sector, the digitization of production processes is already the state of the art, while the artisan sector is starting to feel the need to manage production processes through digital services.

The ARCO Sottoriva Project was therefore born from the desire to exploit the connectivity of the machines manufactured and sold by Sottoriva S.p.a. to start a servitisation process, in order to expand the commercial offer towards its customers, whether they are industrial or artisanal. The project intends, also through a machinery revamping activity, aimed at exploiting the modern Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies to guarantee connectivity, to develop an IT architecture capable of providing services to customers based on the connection of the machinery and consequently identify, design and provide a set of digital services that will be added to the offer of manufactured machinery, allowing customers to create “Industry 4.0 compliant” plants.

During the project, Sottoriva S.p.A., an excellent mechanical manufacturer, aims to evolve its status of digital maturity, with the aim of generating a competitive advantage within the reference sector and to represent a cutting edge compared to other SMEs in the area of industrial data management.

The ARCO Sottoriva project aims to combine the high mechanical quality of its products with an IT architecture capable of guaranteeing the collection and communication of data, the remote control of machinery, the display and processing of information.

This transformation will bring benefits to both Sottoriva S.p.A. customers, who will be able to improve the performance of their plants in terms of productivity, energy efficiency, safety and life cycle through remote monitoring and control of the machinery, but it will also benefit Sottoriva S.p.A., supporting the development of the offer of value-added services, customer loyalty, the improvement of internal performance and the competitiveness of the brand on the market up to the point of enabling new business models.

The solution

Technologies

  • IIoT platform (Industrial Internet of Things) necessary to enable the connection of the machines and the consequent transmission of their operating parameters.
  • Development of a web application available to Sottoriva S.p.a. customers dedicated to providing reporting services, monitoring and remote control of machines.

The implementation of a service for the collection of data generated by machines had the aim of making Sottoriva S.p.A. a company capable of starting Data-Driven activities, guided by the analysis of the behavior of its products. In this way it was possible to develop a framework that allowed SMEs to derive value from the data generated by the machinery in operation at their customers.

As regards the activities dedicated to predictive maintenance, the impact and benefits provided by the introduction of the IIoT platform capable of identifying the state of health of the machinery through operating parameters were analysed.

Furthermore, it was essential to analyze the cost of transferring and saving data on a dedicated infrastructure in order to be able to remotely assess the state of health of one’s machinery.

Impacts

  • Identification of a servicing strategy: a business model was defined through which it was possible to identify the types of services that can be provided through the IIoT solution developed, as well as their value and related costs.
  • Identification of the signs of interest generated by the machinery and definition of their adequate acquisition and transmission policy.
  • Development of the IT architecture capable of meeting the needs and requirements of the user, in order to bring value to the customers’ production departments.
  • Development of a know-how dedicated to the concepts of Predictive Maintenance: it was possible to identify the states of alteration of a machinery with respect to the normal deterioration curve which consequently led to the development of an adequate maintenance engineering activity.

Benefits for the company

  • Introduction of new tools to be offered to customers for the optimization of their production;
  • Reduction of the impact of maintenance activities in terms of:

o Number and time of interventions dedicated to restoring the functionality of the machinery;

o Management of spare parts

  • Increase in the number of interventions managed in “full-online” mode, allowing for further development of the concept of industrial smart working.

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