OVERVIEW
Connected Factory is Bitia’s IoT solution for connecting production lines and enabling telemetry to receive production data and alarms in order to calculate efficiency and provide real-time cloud dashboards. With the integration of ProcessMaker, Bitia has expanded the solution’s capabilities, giving business users and operators new process-management features.
BUSINESS CASE
Detecting alarms on production lines and performing cluster analysis is a best practice for improving products and processes.
But when an alarm is triggered and a production machine stops, the operator and production manager must open a maintenance request—whether for the internal maintenance team or the machine manufacturer’s support service.
During the intervention process, all parties need to exchange information about the issue and possible solutions. Too often this information is lost, or operators record their observations on inefficient paper documents.
Finally, given the limited availability of maintenance teams, it is crucial to assign the correct priority to each request and act quickly on the stoppages that could cause the greatest losses.
SOLUTION AND BUSINESS VALUE
By leveraging ProcessMaker’s extensive API set, Bitia integrated into Connected Factory a “maintenance request” workflow that allows operators to initiate a maintenance ticket. Requests can be managed by the internal maintenance team or, when needed, forwarded to the production machine manufacturer’s support service.
Process participants share information, and the production manager can prioritize urgent interventions.
All maintenance-process data is stored in the ProcessMaker platform to build a solutions database.
Finally, a data lake—via API integration—collects the gathered data to correlate production orders, production metrics, alarms, operator notes, and the duration of every phase of the process, from the operator’s request to the intervention’s resolution.
Automating the maintenance process improves data collection and eliminates paper. Correlating production data and alarms with operator and maintenance notes enables optimal analysis of losses caused by machine downtime.
At the same time, managers gain a clear, detailed view of maintenance response times and can optimize both internal processes and supplier-related processes.
But this is only the most visible advantage. The most important outcome is the adoption of a strategic asset within the company: integrating ProcessMaker allows customers to use “Connected Factory” not only to monitor production in real time and make decisions, but also to drive decisions throughout the production process.
With the exponential growth of IoT solutions and smart devices, companies are collecting large volumes of valuable information that these devices can capture and share. This creates an increasing need to introduce Business Process Management (BPM) solutions to guide the flow of information.
BPM enhances integration between smart devices and orchestrates the flow of information. Smart (IoT) devices send information that can be orchestrated through a BPM process, triggering subsequent actions.
The convergence of IoT and BPM makes the boundary between business functions and machines transparent, enabling companies to make better decisions faster: people and machines collaborate in the processes of the modern factory through the “BPM of Things.”