Transforming data into action

How ALPLA is using real-time information to

increase efficiency on the factory floor

The manufacturing industry faces multiple achieving best-in-class quality at high volume
challenges: increasing quality demands, labor and a competitive price. In 2020, ALPLA has
shortages, cost-pressure… plants in 181 locations worldwide, operating in
46 countries with almost 21,000 employees.
To stay competitive, it is crucial to invest in
technological innovation. The traditional
The plastic packaging production
operational processes have to be modernized,
process
taking advantage of the technologies that are
now available. In the new industry, decisions Plastic packaging is a complex manufacturing
are data-driven; operations are remotely process, consisting of the following main steps:
monitored in real-time, efficiency is improved, 1. The raw plastic is first pulled from big silos in
and costs are reduced. the form of pellets.
In this article, we will show you how ALPLA, a 2. The plastic pellets are transported to the
world leader in the development and production material dosing equipment. There, coloring
of plastic packaging solutions, is using the materials and other additives are added.
Crate IoT Data Platform to digitalize their 3. In the processing machine, pellets are
factories. melted and extruded into a metal mold. The
mold is cooled so that the plastic freezes on
About ALPLA contact, forming a bottle.
ALPLA is a well-established manufacturer of 4. The bottles are weighed on a scale and
innovative plastic packaging systems, bottles, inspected for leaks in a testing machine,
closures, and injection-molded parts. 5. A visual inspection is done using camera
Founded in 1955 and based in Austria, the systems to detect defects and check the
company serves major brands in markets such dimensions of the bottles.
as beverages, food, beauty care, and home 6. Bottles are moved to handling machines and
care. In 2017 alone, ALPLA produced over 100 then boxed, packaged, palletized, and
billion consumer goods packages, and with delivered.
over 100,000 tons of recycled plastic, it is also Temperatures, pressures and blending ratios
one of the leading packaging companies when need to be precisely defined on every machine;
it comes to minimizing plastic waste and plastic it not, quality suffers, and production costs
reuse, also known as the closed-loop plastic increase.
economy.
Investing in innovative manufacturing helps
securing ALPLA's leadership in the market,

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Problematics the employee training process. It was the time to

build a new system.
In the past, to look for quality failures required
multiple operators continually moving around the The result of ALPLA’s search for a new
factory floor, checking every machine. As technology was a proof of concept built by
production lines are laid out over the whole Crate.io. Crate.io's solution, based on CrateDB,
factory, the distances between machines can be was able to handle huge amounts of real-time
considerable. This was a slow and laborintensive data in a multi-plant environment. It also required
operation. significantly less resources than all the other
solutions ALPA looked at, and it was 10x
The delays introduced by having to walk around
cheaper.
the factory meant that many products were often
affected before the error was spotted by the
The Crate.io solution
operator. This resulted in the loss of valuable
machine time, together with raw material.
Additionally, ALPLA's market entry in North Analytics Visualization
Rules System
America in 2001 was followed by years of
tremendous growth. By 2015, ALPLA was
already operating 14 manufacturing plants,
having more than 1,000 employees in the USA.
This growth came with the challenge of hiring
and training enough personnel to run the
complex manufacturing processes. With the old
IoT Edge MES Manufacturing Notes System
setup, every plant required specially trained
experts, for every machine and on every shift.
The figure above gives an overview of the
elements included in the solution Crate.io built for
The future of manufacturing
ALPLA, the Crate IoT Data Platform.
At that time, ALPLA was already producing
plenty of data (around 3 GB per day) coming from Through the Crate IoT Data Platform, information
the process control systems and sensors. is collected in real time, and direct feedback is
However, this valuable information was not being provided to the operators on the production floor.
used in a productive way. This allows ALPLA to establish a closed loop of
continuous monitoring and improvement, based
ALPLA already had a proprietary in-house on the data that is read from the different
system that was collecting machine data, using a production lines.
SQL database as a data warehouse. All the
plants in the USA were connected to this First, the desired production state for every
system—but the data volume kept growing, and machine and line is defined, using product
the database performance started to suffer. The specifications, Bills of Materials from the
response time for queries got longer; data Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system,
analytics were taking more and more time. With product specifications, tolerances from Quality
the technologies ALPLA was already using, to Assurance (QA) systems, target times from shop
innovate was not possible. floor… Then, this desired state is compared to
the actual state of the production line. Weak
Jodok Schäffler, the General Manager of ALPLA points are identified, defining actions to correct
North America, wanted to operate the production them.
line with more efficiency and less latency.
Besides, he wanted to find a way to speed up

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Dashboard showing a real-time overview of the production lines

Analytics, monitoring, and visualization • Alarm messages from the production

dashboards are built on top of the Crate IoT Data machines, such as material running low in a
Platform, allowing supervisors and management piece of dosing equipment
to get immediate insights into any aspect of the
• The state of a process, e.g., the temperature
production process.
of molten plastic in an extruder, or the
The screenshot above is an example of a pressure at the extrusion nozzle
dashboard used by ALPLA. It shows the current
• The configured parameters of a machine,
status of all production lines of a plant, and a
such as the speed setting of an extruder
summary of the state of main metrics during the
last 24 hours. Failing checks are handled in one of two ways:

Closing the loop: the Rules System 1. Some are automatically converted into notes
and sent to the staff in the production floor
Deviations between the desired state and the right away (more about the Notes App later).
actual state of the production line indicate a need The operators can immediately correct the
for action on the shop floor. To that end, a Rules issue.
System runs predefined checks on all the data
streaming into CrateDB from all the connected 2. Checks reflecting more complex issues are
plants. sent to Mission Control first, so an expert can
assess them before creating a note for the
Checks are defined for a specific production production floor.
process in one plant, and can be reused in other
plants with the same production process. This The Mission Control
makes the system easily scalable, reducing the With the Crate IoT Data Platform system in place,
cost of duplicate work. ALPLA could now take action.
The Rules System is operational 24/7. It They set up a dedicated Mission Control room in
continually performs different types of checks, McDonough, GA, with operators monitoring the
monitoring the following aspects: operation of 11 plants across the USA. Having a
• Product quality, e.g., weight data from a scale, single Mission Control room gives ALPLA the
or dimensional deviations from a vision possibility to consolidate the expert operators in
system one location, giving them other advantages as
well:
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/ TRANSFORMING DATA INTO ACTION

The Mission Control room the machine operator, asking them to check the
cooling. This action avoids an unexpected drive
shutdown, reducing downtime and increasing
OEE.
Another example: the Mission Control operator
might see an upward trend in the weight of a
product. By sending a note to the machine
operator, this weight drift can be corrected before
it becomes a quality control issue. This, in turn,
reduces material waste caused by out-ofspec
products.
• Centralized alerting and monitoring
• Centralized manual checks
The Notes App
• Increased Overall Equipment Effectiveness After either an automatic check or an
(OEE) assessment from the Mission Control, notes are
sent to operators in the production floor. These
• Reduced material waste
notes are received by assignees responsible for
• Remote support specific tasks, such as machine operation or
• Reduced travel costs for support staff maintenance. They are equipped with Bluetooth
earbuds; each note results in a voice notification
The Mission Control dashboards provide insight
using text-to-speech functionality.
into the current state of the machines and
processes, as well as information from historical The figure below shows the Notes App. From left
data (with a range from the previous minutes to to right, we’re looking at screenshots of:
the last couple of months). From this high-level 1. A list of notes displays, resembling an
vantage point, operators can put the more automatically maintained to-do list for this
complex alerts into context, notifying the staff on assignee
the shop floor by issuing manual notes if
necessary. 2. Detailed information and proposed resolution
activities the operation sees after selecting a
For example: if temperature check for an electric note
drive was triggered, the Mission Control operator
can assess whether the temperature suddenly 3. Notes can also have documents attached
spiked or was slowly rising. After checking on the with deeper instructions on how to perform
overall throughput and ambient temperature, the the proposed resolution activities, helping
Mission Control operator can then send a note to with employee onboarding

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• The app also provides real-time information

directly to the operator. Operator can see
reports showing the remaining production
time for the current production lots on all
lines, allowing them to start preparing for a
line change ahead of time.
• Machine manuals, operating instructions,
and other documentation are available
directly within the application, giving an
operator immediate access to essential
documents on the production floor.
• Custom notes can be created directly on the
mobile device, and photos can be attached. The historical information about issues,
This allows supervisors to deeply document especially if they are tricky or persistent, is
tasks, requests and issues, facilitating reviewed during regular production meetings,
maintenance. and is ultimately used as input for maintenance
planning and Continuous Improvement
The notes life cycle Programs (CIP).
After resolving the issue, the operator registers
the activities which led to a resolution. This Summary
information is stored together the note, being After a successful CrateDB proof-of-concept, the
used for ongoing process analysis and system that Crate.io built was put into production
improvement. for 11 ALPLA plants across North America.
Additionally, when a note is marked as resolved, Every plant using the Crate IoT Data Platform
the rules system re-runs the original check that saw improvements in Net Equipment Efficiency
initially triggered the note, verifying that the issue (NEE), with some showing efficiencies above
is actually resolved. 90%. Every plant experienced a reduction in
The status of a note is shown visually in the app: manual process adjustments by as much as
50%. The result was a six-figure saving during
the year 2018.
“We can now collect continuous production data,
turn it into information in a digestible format, and
feed it back to the floor for specific action," says
Philipp Lehner, CFO of ALPLA Global. "It's
incredibly powerful. We can guide
decisionmaking on the production floor right in
Here, the red bar shows how much time it took the moment.”
for the operator to accept the note, and the blue
bar shows how much time it took to resolve the Digitalization will inevitably be a part of the future
issue. This simple visualization is used to create industry. If you are a manufacturer, we want to
a quick overview of all the issues affecting a help you get ahead of the curve. Reach out to us
particular plant over time, as in the next figure. and start experiencing the competitive benefits of
an early implementation of the digital future!

Want to know more? You’ll find us at talktous@crate.io

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