Inside India's First Iot Implementation In Glass Manufacturing Industry

AFTER IMPLEMENTING THE Real Time Manufacturing Insights at Piramal Glass, the production efficiency has been enhanced by 1 per cent, which means the production lines (in five plants) are able to manufacture 1 per cent more, amounting to 20 crore in monetary terms, since the technology started working in all the plants over nine months back. EC’s Abhishek Raval speaks with Vijay Shah, Director - Piramal Glass & Executive Director - Piramal Enterprises and Poorav Sheth, CDO, Piramal Glass

Piramal Glass, a global specialist in design, production, and decoration of glass packaging (flaconnage) solutions for pharmaceutical, cosmetics and perfumery, and specialty food & beverage industries, has deployed Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform to digitally transform its manufacturing operations. An early adopter of the technology, Piramal Glass has currently implemented the solution, Real-Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI), on 46 production lines across their four plants at Kosamba and Jambusar in Gujarat, India, Sri Lanka and the United States of America. The plants have an overall capacity of 1375 tons per day, with 12 furnaces and 60 production lines, all of which run on a 24/7 basis.

Piramal Glass has leveraged IoT to get real-time visibility into its line manufacturing operations and to analyse production line losses at various stages. Using Azure IoT Hub, Microsoft helped Piramal Glass acquire data from sensors on production lines to identify quality parameters at each stage and get insights on line efficiencies in real-time. This resulted in improved production efficiency and cost reduction up to 70 per cent as compared to a glass industry manufacturing execution system (MES).

The RoI from IoT has been impressive. “The production efficiency has been enhanced by 1 per cent, which means the production lines (each of the five plants) are able to manufacture 1 per cent more, which amount to '20 crore in monetary terms, since the technology started working in all the plants over nine months back. It has also resulted in 70 per cent reduction in TCO,” says Vijay Shah, Director - Piramal Glass & Executive Director - Piramal Enterprises.