– Nitin Vyas,
Managing Director & CEO, BEUMER India
What are the important features of your Bagging & Loading Machines?
BEUMER Group’s bagging and loading machines are equipped with high-end technology and automation, which enables auto placing of empty bags, filling of various bag variants and automatic loading into the trucks or pallets. Due to the high-performance impeller drives the material flow is optimised, accurate filling through intelligent weighing control technology along with Service-friendly accessibility. The state of art of manufacturing technology and adapted processes allows high end modularity in the machines. The operation is intuitive due to its simple Human Machine Interface (HMI).
Introduction of DX (digital transformation) in conventional packing plant system is clearly the latest technology trend targeted at achieving OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). To start to digitisation of an ecosystem lies with correct adaptation of technology into existing processes. The traditional ways of operation within the packing plant needs to be re-engineered to a process oriented around reduced manpower. Reduction of manpower has always been misconstrued in the current system as no manpower, which is not the actual case.
The induction of automation into an ecosystem would help achieve higher efficiency in critical procedures and processes and also makes the possibility to adopt digitisation and data acquisition which is would be needed in the future for faster and accurate decision making.
Automation (people) and productivity are considered two important features considering that Indians are sensitive to price. How the latest technologies are addressing these aspects?
The common misconception within the Indian cement industry is that to introduce a digital facelift within the current packing plant ecosystem would mean mammoth upfront investment however in reality the related investments on automation are able to produce the ROI period as attractive as 3-4 years in contrast to inefficiencies in conventional ecosystem of packing plants.
Digitisation can be achieved in a phased manner, in the beginning with facelift as loading ends and progressing to being more advanced by transformations at upstream and even advance concepts of warehouse management. What BEUMER Group target with implementation of DX is to increase the production quality of the customers by continuous evaluation and benchmarking with global standard within the industry. A value of OEE lesser than 100 would always mean there is a scope of optimisation and the same can be benchmarked under a common platform. The benefits for customers which we envisage are on multiple grounds and have been described.
To what extent energy efficiency is cost-effective too while ensuring sustainability? How efficient these machines are in dust control?
All the drives used in packing machine BEUMER fillpac R are energy efficient. Rating of main drive motor is only 25 per cent of what we are using in conventional machines.
Dust control system is very much effective for this machine. With the dedusting hood provided below each filling impeller collects all the dust at the point of generation itself. These small hoods are connected through rectangular hoses to main dedusting unit mounted below the packing machine.
What are the factors to be studied in ensuring weighing accuracy during filling cement bags?
It has been a challenge to ensure weighing accuracy with changeover of cement types (in terms of fineness, temperature, moisture) and to take care of filling cycles with change of cement type. Addressing to this challenge BEUMER introduced "SIWAREX" based new age weighing system. The system would now be able to control complex dosing and filling processes autonomously. The benefits of this new introduction are numerous and some of them have been listed below:
Worldwide support
Compatible with Siemens PLC’s
Certification possible (e.g. OIML)
Software backups for fast and easy replacement
The weight results have showed significant improvement in overall efficiency over existing weighing controllers and are able to provide cutting edge weight accuracies to our customers thereby addressing the loss of revenue due to over or under weighing of the bags.
As an next step bringing AI "mGuard" shall be used to provide the hot line support for Beumer customer by allowing remote access to Beumer system (PLC for the machine and plants) securely (VPN tunnel) over the Internet all over the world, which would digitalise maintenance and fault recognition activity involved; which currently is one of the most tedious job thereby reducing the turnaround time.
What is the level of your order book and based on that what are your expansion plans?
Under packing and loading business, we, Beumer India, are at promising levels in terms of order book with healthy manufacturing volume for 600+ spouts and 70+ loading machines orders from domestic as well as international market with target deliveries by the end of Q3-2018. Due to the impact of the strict pollution norms in the Asian markets and particularly in China, the whole ecosystem of the packing line is changing toward full automation and at the same time significantly improving the OEE of the plant. We are quite hopeful that India will follow suit, by adapting to automation and bringing transformation in packing line.
We believe the business share would be quite encouraging for brownfield upgradations/ expa-nsion projects, however at the same time green field projects shall keep coming aligned to healthy demand forecasts for next 4-5 years to come.
Do you manufacture these equipment here or import parts and assemble or do you import the whole machinery? Are there any plans to manufacture thwe machines in India in the near future?
At Beumer Group, we strictly follow our globally defined engineering and manufacturing process at local subsidiary levels. We work through under the principles of CoC (centre of competency) categorised for systems/products. As Beumer India is part of CoC for manufacturing PP equipment, most of these packing plant equipment are being manufactured in our state of art manufacturing facility at Gurgaon, Haryana.
Even as a part of the "Make in India" campaign, we are exporting filling and loading machines to other parts of world, including China, SEA and Europe.