(gentle upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to Lexington, Kentucky.
My name is Kenneth Labhart, and I'm the Innovation Leader
for the Supply Chain Performance Group
with Schneider Electric.
I'm excited to have you here today in Lexington
and I'd like to talk to you a little bit about
a digital transformation
that we've performed here in an aged facility,
a facility that's 63 years old.
Some of the struggles that we've had
in performing that digital transformation,
and how we achieved or went through some of the roadblocks
to perform that digital transformation.
(gentle upbeat music)
So we are here on the factory floor,
we're standing here in our Customer Welcome Center
in the Lexington facility.
We make load centers and safety switches here
in the Lexington facility.
Here in the Homeline Load Centers
for energy distribution
in to commercial and residential applications,
and safety switches.
In single phase, three phase,
varying in size from 30 amp to 200 amp varieties
here in the facility.
We are fortunate enough
to be fairly vertically integrated in this facility.
All of the high tonnage stamping,
the plastic injection molding,
the electroplating
for the coding on our current carrying devices,
the semi-automated assembly,
the painting of the metal itself,
and the semi- automated assembly
and even the material conveyance
from fabrication all the way through the assembly line
is under one roof.
We're also fairly highly automated
in the fact that we make approximately 2.8, nearly 3 million
of these devices a year in this facility
from a raw coil and spill.
And we're making a little over 800,000
of these safety switch devices in the facility.
(gentle upbeat music)
We've progressed through the plant
now to the point of our first station stop,
where I want to talk about Unlocking Silo Data.
We noticed that we had
concentrations of tribal knowledge in the facility,
particular around the knowledge that it takes
to troubleshoot
the pieces of electronic devices that control our machines,
PLCs, PCs, documentation and information on that machine,
critical health signals from that machine
is difficult, requires a special skill for a person to come,
put the laptop up to a device to troubleshoot it,
spend time trying to find documentation.
We've implemented an augmented reality application here,
notice EcoStruxure, augmented operator advisor.
And what EcoStruxure Augmented Operator Advisor
has done for us,
is using the power of dove red
we've been able to unlock that data out of that PLC
and deliver it in a real time image,
overlay that data in a real time image
of an actual camera view of a mobile device,
such that now, a technician or a maintenance mechanic
or a supervisor or an operator, no longer needs
to rely on that tribal knowledge
to connect to programming device, to debug or troubleshoot.
They merely hold the tablet over their equipment
and the critical data pops up in real time and screen light.
It's been very exciting for us
and is delivered through a wifi network in the plants
to our mobile devices.
And let's take a look at one of the 16 different pieces
of equipment that we've implemented this tool on.
And let's see how it's delivered to us
about a 20% reduction in meantime to repair.
(gentle upbeat music)
Now I want to talk about
two of the most important connected products
that this facility has in terms
of its digital transformation or its digital evolution.
The first of what you see is OsiSense offering
the OsiSense RFID offering from Schneider Electric.
The conveyor system at any given time,
we move over 7,000 parts in the sky
from a fabrication group through paint
and to the final assembly group in the right order,
in the right priority, at the right time
to the assembly line.
Another very critical connected product for us
that we have over 300 of in the facility
are the Magelis HMIs.
And you'll see those quite frequently throughout the plant,
it gives all the operators the ability to visualize,
to control the processors in the plant.
And we rely on them very heavily.
This device also has the ability
through the use of two adviser applications known as
Secure Connected Advisor and Mobile Operator Advisor.
The ability to deliver a cyber secure connection
to any device that's on the subset of this device.
It also gives you the ability
to deliver control anywhere in your facility
of the actual HMI screen
through the use of mobile operator advisor.
So we use these throughout the facility,
in this particular case, in our power and free system,
we can look at the information streaming
from anywhere in the facility,
from any one of our processors.
This particular power and free system
that we're standing in front of now,
has eight different control panels like this.
And over 30 HMIs in the system
that we can view what's going on across the plant
and see from any individual location in the plant.
And those are very powerful for us.
(gentle upbeat music)
So we're coming to a very critical process
in the Lexington facility, and that's our Paint Room.
You can understand with a process as this complex,
you know, a seven stage pre-treatment system,
20,000-gallon e-coat tanks,
the ability to e-coat 50 million square feet of metal a year.
We can understand the complexity and the amount of control
and monitoring that each take place.
So what we've implemented here in our paint system,
is we've implemented a solution known as
EcoStruxure SCADA Expert based on InduSoft Web Studio,
which has given us the ability to visualize
and control 167 critical variables in the operation.
Now, the really cool thing about the InduSoft Web Studio
or EcoStruxure SCADA Expert application
is its use of mobile thin clients
and web thin clients
to deliver that content anywhere in the building.
What we're looking at here
is we're looking at a live operator view
of what the operator is using in the facility
to control the processes.
If you look through the control room here,
you'll see another screen that looks exactly the same
because this is a secure web client
that has delivered this view or this input into this process
in multiple locations throughout the video.
(gentle upbeat music)
So, we're at a point of the tour now where I'd like
to talk to you about our Digital Energy Management System
here in Lexington facility.
We utilize two very important tools,
one an edge tool and one an app and analytics layer tool.
The edge tool is known as Power Monitoring Expert.
Power Monitoring Expert lies here at the edge
and uses the system of connected meters in your facility
to tell us exactly where your energy usage occurs.
It also has the ability to extract data from PLCs and PCs,
and it lets you descriptively analyze
comparisons of that connected meter data
with certain things like 50 hooks in our paint system,
the different types of metal that we use in our plant,
gas consumption on a particular day.
Gives you the discreet ability
to descriptively analyze and dashboard your energy usage
in a particular area of a very great detail.
Then at the regional level,
in a cloud application known as Resource Advisor,
you extract, we extract,
our regional operations managers extract
these cloud application data as a power monitoring expert
to the regional level,
and they're able to do plant compliant comparisons
across Schneider Electric.
So for an entire region, we can analyze what we've spent
and where we've spent that,
that type of money compare that to trends in weather,
compare that to trends in year over year trends
or month over month trends.
Now the use of this power monitoring expert at the edge
and this resource advisor at the cloud for a regional look,
to give you an idea of how we've impacted our facility,
Power Monitoring Expert has delivered us
over 20% in energy reduction savings
since its installation,
over a 70% reduction in our carbon footprint,
CO2 production.
It's also given us a 5%,
over a 5% year over year
energy savings reduction.
And it's even, we're on track this year, for 11%
in energy reduction year over year.
And the Resource Advisor application
has given us over a $6 million savings
since its inception here in North America
at a regional level.
So two very powerful tools for us here in Lexington.
(gentle upbeat music)
I wanna thank you for being here with us
at Schneider Electric in Lexington
and I ask that you come to the plant
when you can in person,
and maybe we'll see you then
and tell you how we've developed more of our story.
Thank you very much.
(bright upbeat music)