SENSORS & PROCESS CONTROL
Lotte is a leading manufacturer of confectioneries, ice cream, and other merchandise.
Lotte Corporation’s factory in Urawa, Japan, where Yukimi Daifuku is produced.
e-F@ctory manufacturing concept with the expectation of realising this in the future.”
“The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has only just been introduced to the production of Yukimi Daifuku,” Manako adds. “However, the Urawa plant has many other lines making chocolates and ice creams, so Yukimi Daifuku is not our only challenge. We aim to horizontally deploy this system and construct a smart plant in which ‘symptom management’ and ‘operating rate improvement’ are implemented on numerous lines. Stable plant operation and manpower savings will eventually make a major contribution in terms of costs and so on. If we consider Lotte as a whole, our goal is to further evolve this technology and extend it to other plants.”
Manako explains how, in the course of daily production, machines do not operate in the same condition every day. To remedy this in the past, experienced staff members would have checked and adjusted the settings of the machines. However, with e-F@ctory it is possible to visualise the condition of machines, and indeed the machines themselves can issue instructions to make adjustments. In addition, while maintenance and failures remain unavoidable with machines, the team at Lotte anticipate they will be able to manage these issues more effectively using e-F@ctory’s symptom management features.
www.mitsubishielectric.com.au www.lotte.co.kr
ASC marks Cognex and Mitsubishi milestones Automation Systems & Controls (ASC), a leading Australian industrial automation innovator, recently acknowledged two major milestones for its esteemed international partners: Cognex and Mitsubishi Electric. In 2021 Cognex is celebrating 40 years of camera inspection development. The machine vision specialists put their longevity within the ever-changing tech marketplace down to being “bold and creative”. They are proud to state that they still “move fast like a start-up”, yet the company has decades of established processes to ensure that its product is of a premium quality when released. Cognex has 40 years of pedigree and yet it continues to abide by a “young in spirit” philosophy. Mitsubishi Electric began in 1921 as a result of Japan’s escalating industrialisation process. The company’s early decision to focus on the research & development of products that are in high demand internationally, in a forerunner of globalisation, has been sustained throughout its highly successful 100 years of growth. Mitsubishi Electric has for decades been at the forefront of automation control, with cutting-edge programmable logic controllers (PLCs), switches and human-machine interfaces (HMIs). To celebrate its 100th anniversary, Mitsubishi Electric has created a special section of its website dedicated to the milestone. There you can find a full graphical history of the journey and even a theme song that embraces the occasion. The team at ASC is proud to have been a partner of both Cognex and Mitsubishi Electric for decades and are excited to represent both companies Australia-wide into the future. www.asconline.com.au www.cognex.com www.mitsubishielectric.com
AMT JUN/JUL 2021
105
