How can HAI help the textile industry to overcome the challenges?
How can HAI help the textile industry to overcome the challenges?
In today’s dynamic manufacturing environment, there is a constant need for improvement in process. A company cannot rest on past performance and expect to remain successful.
Customers’ expectations change rapidly, and manufacturing processes have become very demand driven. In addition, the environmental expectations have become more stringent.
Complex manufacturing processes like fiber production, spinning, weaving, knitting, dyeing or finishing are not just difficult to control but also high in energy and water consumption.
Additionally, delicate raw materials with high variation are used.
Here is a solution that has helped many manufacturing companies to professionalize their operations and become more data-driven.
Textile industry lab equipment is often state-of -the-art, but information storage and sharing systems often need improvement.
That means the textile industry is particularly dependent on integral process control to produce consistent, efficient results.
Controlling and predicting process variables during the process reduces defects and deviation in product quality, thereby minimizing waste, costs, and environmental impact.
Close monitoring of performance characteristics
Textile solutions are innovation drivers and problem solvers – and often they are sustainable. Textiles can do a lot, especially for the future!
The use of suitable textile materials in such highly sophisticated applications as medical devices, automotive industry, aircraft and aerospace, filtration, civil and construction engineering requires the maintenance of high-quality products. It has become mandatory that the performance characteristics are certified and guaranteed.
These properties must be controlled during the whole manufacturing process to meet the requirements. The laboratory equipped with high-performance testing machines plays an important role in controlling the quality of the batches.
The textile industry is facing many challenges
Nevertheless, the textile sector is facing many challenges. Such as:
- The shortage in supply of raw material connected with costs increase.
- High pressure to meet stringent social and environmental norms.
- Lack of efficiency in the production due to the manual work and difficult to organize weaving sector.
While the Labs equipment is state-of -the-art, the information storage and sharing systems need often updating.
The biggest issue is to find an industry-specific solution, which manages the data in the way required.
While the Lab equipment is state-of -the-art, the information storage and sharing systems need often updating. The biggest issue is to find an industry-specific solution to manage the data in the way required.
The end-quality for manufacturing technical textiles depends on the quality of yarn, loom parameters, fabric/knit parameters, and environmental conditions as well as the operator’s skill and workload. The most common reasons for the stoppage of looms is yarn breakages, machine failures or necessary changes of the warp beam.
Leaving the parameters unmonitored can lead to various problems, from producing scrap to long stoppage of the loom. However, the monitoring is not that easy when you are managing a high number of looms running with different yarn types and producing different products. The paper-based records are not simplifying this challenge either.
Leaving the parameters unmonitored can lead to various problems, from producing scrap to long stoppage of the loom.
So, how can HAI help to overcome the challenges and become a modern digital factory? Here is a solution that has helped many manufacturing companies to professionalize their operations and become more data-driven:
Reliable information – in real time, correct, complete
A first step is often to unlock data from the inline and online process control systems, and show the compliance of these data in real-time dashboards. The HAI software has standard connectors for reading data from the PLC/SCADA system or a data historian. This automatically provides you with a large portion of the information required.
This approach has another advantage: it is no longer necessary for operators to keep manual records of process data. Examples are start-/finish timestamps, regular checks on speed, width, density, tension, weave room conditions, and in-process measurements like for example the weight and add-on control at a coating machine.
The product-quality test-results from raw materials, intermediates and finished product done in the laboratory are also collected automatically. The lab technicians no longer have to write the results on paper and then enter it in Excel-files. The data is transferred automatically from the Scales, Pick Counters, Tensile testing machines, and other testing machines into HAI software. Thus avoiding incomplete, difficult to read and unclear results. The verification of the results against the specification gives you a real-time compliance monitoring and automatic release.
No matter how you slice it, there will always remain some measurements or records that cannot be read from a database or machine. Think of visual or organoleptic inspections, QA inspections, start-up checks, etc. You can easily set up handy input screens for these in the HAI software. In this way, the manual checks also automatically become part of the registration.
Now you have all the information from the manual registrations and the automatically collected data together in one database. In short: everything that has been checked, registered, and recorded about how a batch came about.
A great basis for a digital factory!
Real-time dashboards
In real-time dashboards, you now monitor all records and measurements and whether these measurements are “within-spec”. You can even see to what extent the current batch is developing in line with the so-called Golden Batch. Trends (SPC) on process conditions and product quality also run in real-time. Using color codes, the operator immediately sees whether the measurements are compliant with the process and quality specification and control limits. This is useful for operators, lab technicians and technologists. They can identify that the process is going off track at a much earlier stage and take preventive action to avoid failures.
Data analysis / Reports
Now that everything is available, you can configure the dashboards according to your needs. Dashboards give real-time information on trends and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), Quality Performance, Adherence to Plan, OEE, Utility consumption etc. This may concern Operator Production Dashboards, Quality Dashboards or Management Dashboards.
This is just the beginning!
Do you want to know more about digitalization for production and quality in the textile industry? Click here.
Or contact Anca Eschbach aeschbach@hai.nl, our expert in Textiles production.
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