NO MORE LINE STOPPAGES FOR SILVER SPARK
Silver Spark uses GoFenz’s remote asset monitoring platform with a fuel management feature, enabled by OMNICOMM’s fuel-level sensors.
The numbers
THE CHALLENGE
THE SOLUTION
Silver Spark Apparel Ltd (SSAL), a subsidiary of the Raymond group, is a key player in the clothing industry.
SSAL operates one of its manufacturing plants in rural Bangalore, India. To reach production targets, it needed to eliminate machine downtime during the 8am to 6pm shift. Because of the frequent power shortages in India, Silver Spark uses diesel generators to bridge the gap, operating four generator sets (gensets) to provide an uninterrupted power supply. To do this, gensets had to be fuelled and ready to start working, but mistakes were easily made during the manual checking of fuel levels. If the tank needed to be refuelled during an outage, it meant an hour of downtime, and a loss of 12% of the production target. This downtime created knock-on effects elsewhere, which could translate to production losses of about $30 000 dollars.
• High-precision, remote fuel-level monitoring
• Automatic controlling of fuel levels
• Real-time data on fuel in genset tanks
• Notifications when the fuel dipped below a threshold
• Easy access to data.
After a long search, Silver Spark met with GoFenz, OMNICOMM’s partner in India. GoFenz specializes in smart city / smart home solutions and has a cloud-based platform for remote asset tracking. GoFenz offered Silver Spark their platform with integrated fuel monitoring enabled by OMNICOMM’s high-precision fuel-level sensors (99.2% accuracy).
The results
OMNICOMM’s fuel-level sensors became part of the solution that helped bring transparency to the process of generators’ fuel consumption and refuelling requirements. Silver Spark was so impressed with the remarkable accuracy and functionality the solution displayed that the company has now adopted it for good.
The generators’ process of fuel consumption is now perfectly transparent. The plant used to keep safety stock of 30% fuel in the tanks. But because the genset monitoring solution warns of low fuel levels, safety stock levels could be decreased, which in turn reduced holding costs. The plant could then also reduce its overhead fuel storage tank from two to one. The fuel-level sensors help to provide continual, accurate data about the fuel level. Operators can easily access this data online, which means their monitoring time has been reduced fourfold.
The new genset monitoring solution ensures that Silver Spark generators are always ready to perform, and power outages cannot halt the manufacturing lines.
“Production downtime avoidance and digitization of fuel inventory using real-time IoT sensors delivered hard savings and productivity improvement.” (Mohit Mehrotra – Managing Director, OMNICOMM India)