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Home Expertise Library Stories How Smart Sensors Optimize Industrial Weighing

How Smart Sensors Optimize Industrial Weighing

Condition Monitoring and IT/OT Convergence Drive Continuous Improvement

Rising costs, growing industrial skills gaps, and the pursuit of measurable return on investment (ROI) have manufacturers leaning heavily on automation and condition monitoring to increase performance and equipment uptime.

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Benefits for Systems Integrators, Machine Builders, and End Users

Benefits for Systems Integrators, Machine Builders, and End Users

Smart sensors enable machine builders to build more compact machines that have a higher degree of precision and support multiple tasks on the same sensor, freeing up space in the machine while reducing equipment costs. 

For end users dealing with increasingly expensive products and production time, leveraging smart sensors allows critical information to flow upward to control systems with unprecedented speed and precision, supporting a lower overall system cost and higher operational efficiency

Why IT/OT Convergence is Imperative

Historically, all production data remained in production, and all IT data lived with IT. Any data that crossed the lines did so only with manual intervention. The process was time-consuming, often incomplete, and too late to substantively improve processes or decision-making.

Today, digital transformation enabled by Industry 4.0 – also known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) – has IT and operational technology (OT) merging. Controlling weight-specific applications by connecting smart sensors to the network allows shopfloor data to integrate with IT and OT simultaneously, solving speed and transparency concerns.

Rather than point-to-point connections, such as a scale to a PLC, smart sensors make multipoint connections possible. A weighing automation device can be connected to a PLC, a distributed control system (DCS), the cloud, and a server – all at the same time  – giving production and back-office personnel real-time access to crucial machine data while individuals in the front office gain the timely IT perspective.

How Condition Monitoring Informs Action

How Condition Monitoring Informs Action

With analog weighing technology, days, months, or a year can go by before anyone realizes a costly problem exists. Condition monitoring with smart sensors provides real-time feedback when something goes wrong and allows time to shut down the process to take corrective actions before producing out-of-spec products.

Condition monitoring is particularly essential when imperceptible changes to a process need to be managed. If a weight variation is detected, it is necessary to know immediately whether the sensor is in good working order and that it is not underloaded or overloaded.

Having smart, prioritized alarming as part of condition monitoring makes it immediately apparent which alarms must be dealt with first. Whether something needs to be calibrated, a wrong step was taken, or an error is becoming more critical, priorities will vary, and the resolutions must be planned accordingly. Root causes can be eliminated before the product or process is comprised.

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