________________________________________________________________________________________ Cascade
Die Casting prioritizing the refurbishment of some of our ancillary equipment, such as a water-cooling tower, which provides cold water to all the equipment in our die casting area. We have also been replacing our legacy equipment with more state-of-the-art machines that can better meet today’ s demands. We’ ve been making structural improvements throughout the concrete buildings, which will result in areas not only becoming more fit for purpose but also making them much more livable spaces for the folks working here. It’ s where they spend a large proportion of their time, so it’ s important to us that we make their work environment as comfortable as possible.
“ Alongside these general improvements, we have included smart factory solutions. Over the last two years, we have adopted some systems to enhance our IoT approach to increase automation. Our control systems, for example, are talking to and taking information from our machines; this information then gets relayed to a visual system that allows you to see all the information in real time for each of the machines.
“ The other major smart solution that we have implemented is in the CNC section of our machining plant, which has greatly improved our response times. For example, the system displays the information in a graph format, which allows you to see where the struggle points are and, in turn, where you need to allocate resources, so it has been a very useful addition.”
The implementation of smart factory solutions and the refurbishment of equipment have improved both productivity and the working environment. As efficiency advances, certain challenges in the process can become more obvious. Pat highlights a particularly illustrative example:“ Lifting
manufacturing-today. com 109