Hello. I'm Nicole Bulanda
from Rockwell Automation.
I'm the Customer Advocacy
Program Manager and we are here
to talk about Results Achieved.
I'm joined by Peter from Ecolab
to hear about a cool project that
they've been putting in place.
Hi, Peter. Hey, how are you doing? Good.
Can you tell everyone who
you are and what Ecolab does?
My role is around automation and
digital transformation within the
healthcare surgical manufacturing
facilities and that includes new
automated equipment, machines,
new manufacturing softwares and
new technologies that we want
to bring into improve product
quality and improve efficiencies
and also drive data and start to
capture and analyze that. Nice.
And can you share with
everyone what Ecolab produces,
because I think that's pretty interesting.
Yeah,
I think Ecolab in general,
for the last 99 years,
they've been finding innovative
solutions to use science to solve
some of the world's biggest
challenges that are out there.
So we're a global leader
in water,
hygiene, and infection prevention solutions
and that's mainly around water,
food, health and the climate as well.
Great.
We're glad to have Ecolab looking
into that and doing all the
research and keeping us safe.
What was the issue that you were
looking to solve or what were
you looking to make better?
So in the healthcare facilities we
faced a number of different problems.
One was around documentation
being heavily paper based.
We were producing millions upon
millions of handwritten documents
every year and it led to a lot of
inefficiencies with data being
trapped away and never getting
the insights out of it.
So we wanted to extract the
information out of that and go
from paper to glass and we also
wanted to automate some of the
labor-intensive tasks.
It was very time consuming to
do a lot of that paper based
documentation and also we wanted
to implement a software that
could ensure that we operate
in a fail-safe environment.
We also had no visibility for
manufacturing facilities in real time
so we wanted to change that around
so we could be more proactive and
get the right information to the
right people at the right time
and also in the right format.
I love that little saying
you said: go from paper to glass.
I think that's something that
companies just in general are
looking for ways to do to do. You
said worker efficiency,
does it help with errors too
I would guess? Absolutely.
We're all human at the end of the
day and we can be prone to make
mistakes.
Yes, driving those out.
That's great.
So OK, we are going from paper to glass.
We are looking for a system that can
connect and give you high level visibility.
What did you choose?
What did you put in place?
Well for one,
we chose
Rockwell Automation because of your experience
in the OT environment.
We wanted to really leverage your
experience and use that to help us.
And then for the solution,
we chose ThingWorx IIoT Platform.
We chose that as our software
solution after vetting a number of
different other solutions, and that
was our preferred solution of choice.
We're very happy to have our
partnership with PTC and the ability
to offer ThingWorx to our customers.
We know a lot of them find it beneficial.
Why did you choose ThingWorx?
We had a number of reasons that we
chose ThingWorx. It was an
IoT platform that we wanted to use
to connect all of our different
data sources from the manufacturing
floor up to our ERP systems.
We didn't want data to be
siloed or unaccessible to us,
so that was a major benefit to us.
We also wanted to future-proof
the solution so that we could have
something that we could expand on the
future in terms of functionality as
well as other manufacturing sites and
get those spun up on the system rapidly.
And third was around,
we wanted to heavily customize any
platform that we were putting in.
We wanted a modern user interface
and we wanted wanted it to be
centered around the operator so
that we could ensure the data was
high quality and then we could make
high-quality decisions on that.
What happened after you put it in place?
What's it looking like now
in your facilities?
So the facilities now we're
starting to operate in real time.
We can get the production metrics,
we can get the quality metrics, and start
to get that in real time to the operators,
to the supervisors, to the leaders.
And we've also started
to uncover some of the
hidden aspects that are
going on their plants.
So uncovering hidden downtimes,
understanding more about
our machine capabilities,
finding trends in data - that's being
hugely beneficial to us. That's great.
So in addition to your initial goals of
putting everything that was handwritten,
taking a lot of time,
breaking down those data silos.
You're also able to use that data to
make some cool business decisions,
it sounds like,
and find areas for improvement?
Absolutely.
We're improving our processes as well
as our business and our quality.
We're finding a lot of
success with it.
That's wonderful.
Thank you for sharing your story with us.
Ecolab is making some really neat innovations
with digital transformation and we're
glad to be able to share your results.
Thanks
Peter.
Thank you.