BOLOGNA – IMA Group continues to consolidate its digital innovation strategy with increasingly advanced and customer-oriented services. The round table organized in July in partnership with PTC was an opportunity to share the latest IMA digital solutions aimed at optimizing the production of the Group’s customers.
Within the web events, IMA experts presented the latest innovations born from the collaboration with PTC with a focus on IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), thus re-launching the message of a necessary, increasingly coordinated and uniform innovation to maintain industrial leadership in a highly competitive sector such as manufacturing.
Among the offered services, the APP developed with PTC on a ThingWork basis is meant to facilitate customers in real-time monitoring of the operating conditions of the lines. Thanks to the accessible data of this simple and intuitive APP, the end user has an active and fully autonomous involvement in the decision-making processes to make changes and adjustments directly on the systems. Among the numerous advantages that the APP guarantees there is a natural increase in OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) that can be reached in a short time. The possibility of translating effectively the KPIs plants into measurable values then allows a deepening of the loss analysis and opens up the opportunity of deepening the details regarding inefficiencies, downtime, average intervention times to make all the necessary corrective actions and restore full efficiency of flows.
“The scalability and the opening of the developed APP allow the end-user the access to the entire set of real-time information generated by the machines using a wide range of devices – tablets, smartdevices, notebooks etc. – and regardless of where the customer is located, “said Martina Stefanon, AMS Business Development Director at IMA Group during the recent online event. “Only the most precise and detailed knowledge of its own production assets makes an improvement of process efficiency possible. And this can only be done by understanding their status, that is, by analyzing and using the data they generate, in order to increase uptime and consequently optimize costs and margins”.
The developed APP integrates with the services offered by the IMA Digital Room, a control center that constantly monitors the production of the customer’s machines or installed base, remotely. Inside the Digital Room, a team of expert engineers available 24/7 monitors the operating conditions of the plants by taking into consideration both KPIs and value parameters to anticipate and report potential future malfunctions to customers, in order to set corrective actions and make the production more efficient.
The protection of data and information from hackers or malware attacks on the network is fundamental in the IOT sector. “IMA recently launched A4Gate,” explained Pier Luigi Vanti, ICT Corporate Director at IMA Group, “an integrated hardware/software solution that allows the users to control the data transmission from a machine/source inside the plant to the outside, ensuring full information confidentiality and preventing cyber threats”. The developed product fully supports features related to the IoT Edge & IoT Data Collector, IoT Remote Access Control and 24/7 connection to the Digital Room, all in maximum security and allotment from external penetration attempts.
The growth of projects aimed at monitoring production trends and protecting the data generated within the plants is the natural evolution of the IMA Digital initiative. The parallel agreement signed with Antares Vision at the beginning of June is also part of the project’s development plans. The ongoing collaboration inherent in the supply of inspection systems is consolidated in a partnership extended to the most innovative Antares Vision solutions for product traceability and for the smart data management.
The new five-year agreement with Antares Vision sees the synergistic development and implementation of innovative solutions in the context of specific projects, new businesses and products, with the aim of not only consolidating and potentiating technological leadership but also offering new application and business potential to their customers.
