Context
Nowadays everyone is aware of the huge relevance of being able to control and explore data. Without doubt it’s one of the main keys for a business to be fruitful and achieve its maximum performance. In this occasion, our company, The Forest Next, has been collaborating with Ruffini SA in order to provide them with the control they need in their aluminum ovens through a project focused in the design of a robust strategy to manage all the data collected.
Line of research: Own development
Category: Industry solutions, Competitive inteligence
Date: Juny 2019
Analysis
For Ruffini SA it’s essential to have an absolute control over their aluminum ovens since it’s important to be up to date with many intern parameters in order to prevent anomalies, save costs and, of course, achieve the best quality for the products. However, working this exhaustive control over the data is actually extremely difficult to maintain with traditional methods of data collection. Moreover, when the data volume is too big or physically difficult to get it becomes inviable.
That’s why from The Forest Next we proposed a solution based on IOT technologies and Big Data tools to fix the problem. The aim is to make the data easy to collect and provide the capacity of visualizing and exploring huge amounts of already collected data.
Developing the strategy
From the previous mentioned problem, we synthetized some key factors to implement in order to provide an optimum solution: modeling of the data, collection of new relevant data, visualization and exploration of the data.
In the first place, the way the data was being collected and the software that was being used to visualize it were affecting the potential behind all the available data. Given this, from The Forest Next we designed a new data model and implemented a modern and powerful database where we migrated all the existing data.
Meanwhile, in order to get a total control over the ovens parameters we decided to implement an IOT solution based on connected sensors acquiring real-time data available in the cloud about different zones of the ovens.
Finally we opted for avant-garde software made for visualizing huge data volumes and obtaining graphics, metrics and KPIs that resulted being very useful for all the responsible persons making it easy to detect anomalies and strange behaviors as well as optimizing decision-making. Thanks to the new data model, it’s possible to filter through many fields and different time-spaces, make comparatives and prognostics.
Implementation results
The implementation of the proposed solution has been an absolute success. Our client has improved in many terms, productivity, error handling, timings… In the same way the quality of the final product has raised and the costs have been lowered. The newly acquired capability of exploring the data is a future-perspective inversion since many relevant information is waiting to be discovered.