With the advent of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), connected objects are starting to make their way into the industry, and corollary of this expansion, connected maintenance. Always driven by the market and innovation, the Group ALLIMAND, designer, manufacturer of paper and Nonwovens machines, is reflecting on the subject. Back to the fundamentals…

From preventive maintenance …

Who, during a factory visit in the years 80’s – 90’s, never witnessed an operator stuck on a machine, causing the rupture of a whole production line of? At the time, the industrialists practiced “functional automation”. They had their own services to regulate breakdowns (mechanics, electricity, hydraulics … etc.).

Fortunately, the industrial world has evolved! The evolution of control systems has allowed the visualization of processes and the regrouping of machine information. Operator aids have been put in place to make machine operation easier (visualization of graphics, etc.), and in particular, the first level of assistance for breakdown diagnostics.

“In the last few years, the ALLIMAND Group has initiated a concept of preventive maintenance, aimed at defining the number of operating hours of a part and potentially the need to change it. These services are now managed by the ALLIMAND SERVICES department“, explains Gilles TURREL, ALLIMAND’s Automation Manager.

To predictive maintenance
Automation is currently moving towards industrial computing. Maintenance and monitoring are not limited to the analysis of data; the goal is to provide users with features to facilitate their tasks.

These features include: storage and sharing of technical documents, report writing tools and trouble tickets, history of data and actions, role management and access rights, a notification system by e-mail and SMS … etc. And why not move in the medium term, to the preventive maintenance of a speciality machine via connected sensors that will trace the information such as temperature, pressure or level of wear of a part of the machine…?

“When we are able to consolidate this data which is currently capitalized by the ALLIMAND Group’s start-up and maintenance technical teams – field data and data provided by the machine control systems – we will then be able to analyze them, define operating matrices, interact on this data remotely and make maintenance predictions” says Gilles TURREL.

A digital innovation strategy 5.0. coupled with a cyber-security need for industrial systems

The ALLIMAND Group is considering a real investment strategy in automation, in order to be able to collect data from remote machines via an advanced digital infrastructure. “It’s about moving towards Industry 5.0, production-oriented, in order to collect information to a data acquisition system on a server with careful data analysis” argues Franck RETTMEYER, ALLIMAND Group CEO.

The goal is to be able to interact on this data remotely and to be able to adapt the paper machines accordingly.

In addition to digitization, Franck RETTMEYER also puts the related data security issues into perspective, in order to guard against potential cyber-attacks, given the increasing connectivity of equipment.