NYX achieves best-in-class scrap rate with AI manufacturing optimization

The Challenge

NYX, like many American manufacturers, faced significant business challenges: staffing shortages, rising costs, increasing customer demands for better pricing, faster delivery times and higher product quality, plus growing sustainability requirements.

Traditional approaches proved ineffective. Hiring additional operators (often inexperienced), purchasing new machinery, or extending planned downtime for reliability improvements resulted in economic inefficiencies and productivity losses.

Current monitoring systems such as manual downtime recording and quality testing introduced errors, varied with human interpretation, and often masked root causes. Meanwhile, preventative maintenance and quick-fix repair solutions addressed only symptoms rather than underlying problems.

The Solution

IIoT-based solutions, such as Milacron's M-Powered developed by ei³, address NYX's manufacturing challenges directly. Quality testing is conducted with greater precision through the online collection of test results, with real-time data analysis to account for irregularities and inaccuracies in the testing process. The results are scrutinized for trends and patterns related to machine function. The "M-Powered" recipe management tools proactively alert operators to address irregularities highlighted in the test data before they escalate into significant quality issues.

In numerous instances, ei³'s AI-driven cause-effect pattern identification process provides valuable insights to operators, facilitating the identification of the root causes of downtime. Unusual events are automatically identified and compared with baseline machine scores, linking problems directly to specific components or operator processes. NYX utilizes the informative graphing functions within "M-Powered" to emphasize key downtime areas, allowing operators to swiftly extract significant insights. They can pinpoint the relevance of changeover times, repair times, start-up times, or machine parts prone to failures.

Interactive dashboard showcasing machine wear trends

Results

• 23% Reduction in Scrap Rates: Fewer than one part in 100 deviating from stringent quality standards.

• 10% Reduction in Unplanned Machine Downtime: Pivotal role in monitoring wear and tear, enabling timely replacement of critical components, preventing noticeable declines in quality and performance.

• 8-12% Reduction in Routine Maintenance Expenditures: Intelligent calculator leveraging real-time machine data for optimal maintenance windows, decreasing resources required for routine activities.

• Operational Efficiency Transition: Complete abandonment of paper tracking for process verification, two-hour inspections, and maintenance documentation.

• Recipe Management Success: Crafting functional recipes for consistent, high-quality production without additional expenses on quality-control personnel.

• Quality Management Efficiency: Valuable insights provided to quality operators through dashboards and automated text alerts.

About NYX

NYX is a leading automotive manufacturer and heavy user of Milacron's large-scale injection molding machines. NYX signed up to Milacron's "M-Powered" service. M-Powered comprises a portfolio of analytical and observational IIoT-based technologies, developed by ei³, which enables Milacron's clients such as NYX to monitor and continuously optimize their manufacturing processes.