Kennametal Becomes Connected, Data-Driven, Responsive, and Intelligent with Shop Floor to Top Floor Insights
“At Kennametal we use data to help accelerate business decisions and make information-driven decisions. We are monitoring things like vibration, temperature, and humidity. We are able to consolidate all of those really quickly because they’re all in Microsoft Azure…All the visualizations you’ll see throughout the plant are Power BI.”
Brad Zorn
Director of Digital Manufacturing & Enterprise Analytics | Kennametal
This is a true enterprise modernization story about the power of cloud technologies to shift a competitive manufacturing landscape. It’s Kennametal’s top executive-driven modernization program to digitally transform the entire business for the future.
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Smart Factory
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One of the toughest tasks that Kennametal faced in their modernization initiative was the level of business and technology integration and organization change management required to reshape the entire production operation, from shop-floor to top-floor. In 2018, Kennametal launched a factory automation initiative, called Smart Factory, their largest single capitalization program to bring the latest automation technologies into manufacturing centers of excellence – a $300MM investment targeted at productivity, efficiency, and quality leadership in their plants, all connected to a new digital customer experience. They later realized the opportunity to unleash a far more powerful set of enterprise-wide capabilities by harnessing their foundations in the Microsoft and SAP platforms.
The Intelligent Enterprise
Kennametal turned to eLogic for strategic leadership to extend the transition from a factory automation initiative to the more comprehensive, enterprise-wide approach. Together they created the Intelligent Enterprise framework to balance four key pillars of modernization: Organization/People, Operational Excellence, Factory Automation, and IT/OT Integration (connecting machines directly to enterprise systems in a closed-loop). It rests upon four core competencies that drive every operation to become Connected, Data-Driven, Responsive, and Intelligent.
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Behind the scenes of the production operations, eLogic established the connective fabric for this modernization to perform seamlessly. That included supporting the enterprise SAP migration to Azure, cleanup and redesign of SAP master data and Planning/Scheduling functions, integrating production machine data, and layering in real-time feedback loops for both immediate and long-term performance enhancements with Power BI, Power Apps, Azure IoT, Azure Machine Learning, Azure SQL, and Azure Data Lake.
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This solution is delivering dramatic results -- all translating into significant annual savings for Kennametal.
“We have seen a 50% improvement in the overall press availability and we currently are almost 50% better on our setup times than we were a few months ago when we started this process. We will actually produce 40% more product in the same envelope with the same group of people.” – Brad Zorn, Director of Digital Manufacturing & Enterprise Analytics, Kennametal
Solutions
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StratMFG™
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Microsoft Power Platform
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Microsoft Azure
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Connected Factory
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Advanced Analytics
Factory of
The Future
50%
Improvement in Machine Availability
50%
Faster Machine Start-Up Times
40%
Throughput
Improvements
Shop Floor to Top Floor Insights
Kennametal’s Enterprise data foundation in SAP needed upgrades & optimization of its own. eLogic’s SAP optimization team revamped factory planning, scheduling, routing, and shop management models and led the cleanup of enterprise master data to optimize how SAP handles all of Kennametal’s shop floor data. This data optimization initiative laid the foundation for the seamlessly connected, intelligent enterprise Kennametal needed. The SAP migration to Azure went seamlessly with zero lost time or rework. This created a new capability to access this core SAP data in the new visualization tools and analytical models.
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To make their plant data accessible and light up intelligence, eLogic ingested data from production machinery to Azure IoT in near real-time. Their shop floor, machine-level data runs directly from production plants through Azure, with monitoring in place so Kennametal has real-time feedback with auto-triggered alerts of issues that need immediate attention, like critical equipment failure.
Throughout the plant, Power BI dashboards highlight production key metrics, identify patterns and trends, surface anomalies, and shed light on service disruptions for Kennametal’s core production processes. Through advanced industry analytics and Azure Machine Learning, Kennametal now has insights that are actionable for every role that influences factory performance, output, and interventions including equipment operators, plant managers, and executive leaders.
Key Stakeholders
Director
Analytics
Use data to accelerate business decisions and make information-driven decisions with Power BI Visualizations throughout the plant.
VP
Manufacturing
Monitor vibration, temperature, humidity, consolidated in Azure to achieve double digit improvements in setup, availability and throughput.