Milacron announces increased Industry 4.0 focus and ei³ partnership at K-2019

At K-2019 Milacron announced their increased focus on Industry 4.0 and their growing partnership with ei³.

Milacron Holdings Corp. (NYSE: MCRN), a leading industrial technology company serving the plastics processing industry is announcing triple digit growth since 2017, fueled through innovative products and the digital solution "M-Powered" based on our partnership with ei³. M-Powered offers a full-suite of Industry 4.0 services and predictive functions that uses advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence to capture value from machine data to improve overall machine performance, such as availability, quality, uptime and many more.

Ongoing improvements

To match the exponential growth, Milacron is tripling its work force for its Industry 4.0 solutions to further monitor projects and provide proactive customer engagement. At Milacron, we believe that all manufacturers should have access to the tools to make the best production decisions. M-Powered is fully customizable, agile and flexible intelligence software, designed to be intuitively used through analytical dashboards and reports to allow manufacturers to interpret problems and uncover opportunities to make optimal business decisions.

The dashboards include basic predictive, prescriptive and analytics capabilities for key Milacron machine components like:

• Heater Bands
• Hydraulic Pumps
• Feed Screws

These predictions enable service teams to turn unplanned downtime into planned downtime, to improve machine availability.

Expanded applications

ei³'s latest innovation in AI through its dedicated Data Science center in Zurich, Switzerland paves the way for new applications to support:

• Preemptive part stocking modules
• Expanded lifetime-tracking for mold, tooling and auxiliary components

Building on these capabilities, Milacron's M-Powered is now able to interpret the data to determine impending failures, maintenance needs, or incorrect recipe settings of the machine. Addressing those issues leads to reduced unplanned downtime, and improved OEE.

These features boost existing M-Powered Industry 4.0 capabilities, valued by countless customers in everyday operations.

Key production reporting features:

• Real-time reporting of production information
• Integrates work orders, production orders, quality, downtime and process parameter results
• User configuration tools
• Automatic scheduled email delivery of configured reports to users and groups
• Variety of formats including pdf, excel and text
• Many standard reports available
• Custom reports can be created upon request

ei³ makes it incredibly easy to reap immediate benefits from your data set. Without much learning, investments, or waiting or large sets of data to collect, at a click of a button you can unlock ei³'s extensive production reporting capabilities.

Comprehensive reports give you information on the status of your operations, allowing you to see what is going on at an unprecedented level of clarity, and take decisions based on facts and figures rather than hear-say.

Each report can of course be adapted to fit your needs, both from a content perspective but also graphically (for example, it will come with your company logo on!), or you can define an entirely new report template. Reports can be browsed in HTML format on-line, sent automatically on a regular basis (daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly), or created when specific conditions warrant it – on trigger.

Any Milacron machine can be enhanced with ei³ AI capabilities in less than two weeks. This system will improve equipment productivity and any process ran on the machinery.

Data security is key

Customers can verify without question what data is collected and ei³ is committed to IoT cloud security.

All modules provided by the collaboration of Milacron and ei³ are secure:

• Security of your data is guaranteed from the creation of the machine data, the transfer to the cloud, to the application and any API integration back into the computer system.
  
  
• Strategically placed private data centers leverages physical infrastructure, redundancy, backup, and failover with 24x7 availability to your machine data with no data limits.
  
  
• A rigorous cybersecurity system to constantly monitor and improve applications, systems and processes that withstand the growing risks of cyber hacking. ei³ has attained the ISO 27001 certification of compliance by DEKRA.
  
  
• Orchestrated based on complete admin autonomy, with access to division, machine, completely auditable remote service translations, and module control for unlimited users to receive actionable information on the machine.
  
  

For a recap of Milacron's Industry 4.0 announcements at K-2019, watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCiQnm9GbpY