Piramal Glass Transforms Manufacturing Operations With Microsoft Azure IoT

Piramal Glass has deployed Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform to digitally transform its manufacturing operations. Piramal Glass has currently implemented the solution, Real-Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI), on 46 production lines across their four plants in Gujarat, India, Sri Lanka and the United States of America.

Piramal Glass has leveraged IoT to get real-time visibility into its line manufacturing operations and to analyze production line losses at various stages. Using Azure IoT Hub, Microsoft helped Piramal Glass acquire data from sensors on production lines to identify quality parameters at each stage and get insights online efficiencies in real-time. This resulted in improved production efficiency and cost reduction up to 70 percent as compared to a glass industry manufacturing execution system (MES). 

Vijay Shah, Director - Piramal Glass & Executive Director - Piramal Enterprises Ltd, said, “As the world’s most preferred supplier of glass packaging solutions, Piramal Glass is committed to continuously adding value to its customers. We are happy to have collaborated with Microsoft on our journey towards digital transformation and business critical future readiness. Glass manufacturing is a complex process with many interactive variables. Combining digital technologies with precision high-quality glass manufacturing has helped us fortify our accelerated growth path.”

The Azure IoT platform enabled Piramal Glass to connect and monitor their equipment to gain real-time visibility into operational data that was previously unavailable. The technology integration was designed for the fast and easy set-up to rapidly showcase the results and build on its existing sensors, equipment, systems, and data. 

Sashi Sreedharan, MD, Microsoft India, said, “Microsoft is committed towards the technological advancement of the manufacturing sector in India. We are excited to partner with Piramal Glass as they create a strong foundation for driving transformational change. It is significant that Microsoft technology enabled plant operations to continue as usual during the rollout of the Azure IoT solution, ensuring no disruption to the core manufacturing and deep integration with critical business processes.”

To facilitate this transformation, Precimetrix, a Microsoft partner, brought in its Plant Monitoring System hosted on Microsoft Azure. The sensors on high-speed conveyor lines were interfaced with data acquisition devices that record the key metrics, as the bottles move along the production line. This data is aggregated on an edge gateway and then pushed to Precimetrix’s Plant Monitoring System on the cloud. 

A custom solution was developed on top of this platform to provide stage-wise losses, production reports, quality control workflows as well as role-specific KPIs on PCs and smartphones of plant personnel.   Actionable alerts are sent through SMS, email and push notifications whenever there is an anomaly detected or the production efficiency drops. In summary, RTMI has democratized real-time information available to all plant stakeholders, enabling them to take faster decisions.