12 PERSPECTIVES AW AUGUST 2021
Colgate-Palmolive Focuses on Machine Health to Improve Supply Chain Operations By David Greenfield
Editor-In-Chief/Director of Content
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rom toilet paper shortages and soaring lumber rates affecting home prices to long-delayed shipments of household appliances and furniture, numerous supply chain concepts once reserved for procurement and logistics professionals have become almost common knowledge to people outside industry. Likewise, a focus on the close connection between production operations and their affect on supply chains is gaining more adherents. As noted in the recent Automation World article, “Supply Chain Optimization and the Future of Industry” (awgo.to/1232): The growing need for end-to-end visibility is particularly relevant for plant-level operators and systems integrators because it often requires more integration between supply chain software and manufacturing execution systems (MES) to extract granular data such as equipment health and material availability that can help to more accurately gauge a facility’s true capacity. Collecting and communicating this data to supply chain partners in real time can assist them in more effectively coordinating their own procurement and inventory activities. A good example of this trend in connecting manufacturing operations to the supply chain can be seen at Colgate-Palmolive where, according to Warren Pruitt, vice president, global engineering services, the company has been bolstering its supply chain reliability by moving
toward predictive maintenance of our machinery. The predictive maintenance model employed by the company “preserves machine health through 24/7 monitoring via wireless sensors combined with analytics powered by artificial intelligence [AI],” said Pruitt. Colgate-Palmolive is feeding this wireless sensor data into Augury’s machine health software platform. Pruitt pointed out that this enables Colgate-Palmolive’s machine data to be compared with machine data from more than 80,000 other machines connected to the Augury platform around the world. “That massive analytical scale brings us insights on how to optimize the performance of equipment and make ever-smarter choices on how and where we deploy it,” Pruitt said. “What’s possible only gets more compelling as this AI solution harnesses more data to create better health outcomes for our machines and our business.”
Sensor data
Approaching the development of this machine health monitoring system at Colgate-Palmolive required investigation into the best sensor type for this job. According to Pruitt, “Bluetooth sensors require a person with a smart phone to collect the data, and wired sensors come with a high price tag. But the wireless sensor solution we’re now using automates that data collection
An Augury Machine Health sensor on industrial equipment. Note: This photo is supplied by Augury and is not from a Colgate-Palmolive plant.
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