Sonae Arauco, one of the world's most relevant companies for engineered wood solutions, has transformed its first plant in Germany, the Nettgau site, into a digital plant, a format that provides an extensive and relevant set of data in real-time to support decision-making.
According to Dirk Beyer, the Plant Manager of Nettgau: “After a few months of use, we can already validate the main benefits of this model. The digital plant makes it possible to work with accurate information in real-time. Thanks to this easy access to data at any time and the correlation of the different process variables, our specialists can now focus on their areas of expertise, on planning and on solving problems.”
In the digital plant, there are over 2,000 process variables that help to explain the main key performance indicators in a drill-down approach, from global to individual ones, visualised in Pareto diagrams. With a customized tool, this data is available to all decision-makers at any time via a single platform - from the control room to the cell phone. The tool, called Digital Plant Viewer and complemented by "Smart Notifications", also relies on the power of artificial intelligence to interpret the data and issue alerts when performance is outside the ideal parameters: in addition to sending a notification to the mobile phones of all those responsible when this happens, it automatically initiates a chain of reactions after a defined period, which can range from a small adjustment to stopping the line.
The digital factory pays off for Sonae Arauco in several ways. It helps to identify organisational improvements, increases the reliability and service life of the systems, reduces downtimes, optimizes costs and even contributes to more free time by reducing bureaucracy. In the past, data had to be recorded manually; today, business information can be centralized and displayed on an online platform.
Angel Garcia Bombin, Industrial Digital Transformation Director, whose team is responsible for developing the concept of the digital plant and implementing it at Sonae Arauco’s various sites, explains: “The digital factory is changing the way we work. We can receive information in real time and react immediately to unforeseen events. State-of-the-art technologies and human intelligence are closely interwoven and thus offer the greatest possible benefit. This puts us on the direct path to the age of Industry 5.0.”
