Toray Plastics

Background

Toray Plastics, a progressive manufacturer of specialty film products, sought innovative ways to increase its overall production efficiency. The company believed if they could marry in-process analytics with their expert engineering and operations teams, they’d substantially improve operating efficiencies, specifically by reducing overall downtime. Toray theorized that if they could predict downtime events during production with some advanced warning, they could adjust the manufacturing process in real-time to avoid conditions that, left unchecked, would have contributed to costly film breaks.

A Visionary Approach

Toray Plastics believes in contributing to society by creating new value with innovative ideas, technologies, and products. Innovation is one of their critical corporate pillars. Technologically, the company’s mission is that information must always flow and that each sub-business must be able to deeply understand, through visualization, monitoring, and iterative analysis, how their particular key performance indicators affect the performance of their own and overall company operation.

The Challenge

Toray produces a variety of engineered plastic film products for industrial uses – each use and customer has its particular specifications and corresponding ideal operating line conditions. Line instability can cause off-quality product and lead to costly line downtime due to scrap and the extended time required for line cleanup when a film break occurs. Each film break costs tens of thousands of dollars.

The Solution

As part of an overall plan to continuously optimize quality and production, Toray implemented an innovative model partnering process engineers and operations teams working together on a 24X7 basis using real-time data and analytics as their central focus.

Toray further looked to leverage AI and analytic technologies and added TwinThread’s Platform to the mix – using TwinThread’s digital innovation capabilities to pull in data from multiple disparate data sources, monitor over 400 measures of line stability, and leverage machine learning to continuously predict and alert top potential causes of line instability and film breaks in real-time.

These insights are presented to process engineers as part of their HMI interface, distilling thousands of pieces of data into just the elements needed to address current problems. The engineers use TwinThread’s analytics to understand the causes of line instability and make real-time recommendations to Operations to avoid line down and film breaks.

The Result

Toray’s forward-thinking approach has seen real results – improving overall uptime from the mid-80 % level to over 90%, saving more than $500,000 annually. The marriage of TwinThread technology with the company’s innovative partnering model delivers new benefits daily. Currently, the company is expanding its use of the TwinThread platform across new lines and product areas, focusing on improving equipment uptime and maintenance efficiency.