“To provide innovative, clean and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow” has been Delta’s corporate mission for the past 50 years. With this commitment, Delta has aligned its business strategy with corporate social responsibility (CSR) and focused on international environmental initiatives. By implementing green product design, Delta enhances the efficiency and reduces the carbon footprint of its products. Overall, Delta saves energy from the three dimensions of products, plants, and green buildings. From 2006 to 2020, Delta has established 28 green buildings and two certified green data centers. However, climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, global surface temperatures and the mean sea level have risen faster than expected while glaciers and ice sheets are rapidly melting. They have declared “a code red for humanity.” Under these circumstances, manufacturers no longer see green factories as an advertising slogan or a way to build a corporate image but as the solution to limit climate change for their operational sustainability.
Observing the environmental changes, Delta has been dedicated to developing sustainable smart manufacturing to help customers overcome energy and skilled labor shortages. To achieve better energy-saving results, Delta has optimized processes and management based on energy-efficient automation products and solutions and is continuously improving its smart green factory solutions. By connecting factory facilities and production equipment to a centralized DIAView or VTScada SCADA System according to scale and DIAEnergie Industrial Energy Management System, data can be collected in a visualized IIoT environment to help reduce energy consumption and increase efficiency.
Delta Joins Forces with a Well-known Global Metal Casting Manufacturer to Build a Large Smart Green Factory
While more and more manufacturers have their eyes on smart green manufacturing, there are brands with long histories in the industry that are also interested in related solutions. This includes a well-known global metal casting manufacturer established in the 1980s with branch offices across the globe and production plants in Taichung and Guangdong that produces bathing facilities and shower systems in zinc, copper, and plastic. As its business scale has expanded, it has been highly aware of digitization and smart automation, and joined forces with Delta to build a large smart green factory of nearly 40 thousand square meters in central Taiwan. The new plant has fully adopted automated production systems.
Delta's sales engineering team visited the site several times in the initial stage to grasp the on-site situation and held exhaustive discussions with the customer to understand their requirements. The team made a comprehensive plan based on the need for a visualized platform for the production equipment and arranged the adoption of automation drives, controllers, sensors, and monitoring systems. By connecting the products to Delta’s DIAViews SCADA System and DIAEnergie Industrial Energy Management System, the plant became an IIoT environment to collect and analyze data. As a result, the admin could monitor each machine's operation and energy consumption in real-time and control the production process to reduce anomaly response times and increase profitability. Due to the transparency of production parameters, productivity, yield rate, and machine information, the production lines maintain high production efficiency and are resilient to accidents.
Delta’s Visualized Monitoring System Helps Create a New Benchmark of High-efficiency Production
With the adoption of Delta's DIAView SCADA System, the customer can visualize data and monitor and control factory facilities and production equipment. The system automatically collects real-time information to keep operation status and long-term historical records on track. The admins can check the needed information with a Web browser and adjust or optimize the production conditions. By matching the historical record, it is easy to figure out problems and blind spots that will improve machine management efficiency and extend equipment life. For production management, the equipment remains failure-free, reduces downtime and management fees, and increases machine utilization rates with real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance. On top of that, it saves all the system alarms in the database, which can quickly distribute emails or text messages to notify on-duty operators through the management platform. It provides the latest information and helps solve problems quickly to reduce losses and benefit subsequent observation and tracking.
In addition, as the customer had high expectations for the new plant’s safety index, Delta planned the smart green factory from a safety perspective that included a safety system, electronic signatures, and digital records. These ensure the system’s execution safety and enable the admins to quickly acquire complete, accurate, open, and safe data to control the whole on-site production process. After adopting the solution, it not only improves productivity and energy consumption, but operators could also deal with anomalies through manual and equipment safety mechanisms, which decreases downtime significantly. In addition, by generating daily reports automatically, it enhances management efficiency by over 30%.
Delta's DIAEnergie Industrial Energy Management System Embraces Intelligence, Technologies, and Environmental Sustainability and Shapes the Smart Green Factory Model
Energy-saving and management are critical to a smart green factory. To optimize results, Delta focuses on energy-saving products and energy-visualized management. First, its inverters and power regenerators increase the energy use efficiency while PLCs and smart electronic meters help schedule and collect energy consumption data. Where it’s challenging to lay wire, Delta installs wireless transmission electronic meters and transmits the power use data to DIAEnergie Industrial Energy Management System remotely through a wireless industrial network switch. Three operators are no longer required to spend five days a month merely for data collection and consolidation. The admin can review all the energy consumption in real-time. With the data from each piece of equipment at different times and seasons, the system can analyze energy consumption and generate demand prediction. The alarm provides an alert when it exceeds the mark, and operators on duty can refer to predicted demand to reinstall. This not only avoids excess fees but saves 22% of the energy for the customer.
Looking back to the pilot run, Delta leveraged its advantages in factory and energy visualization. As a global electronics manufacturer, Delta shared its extensive experience to help the customer integrate an energy efficiency index and equipment productivity to create a standard for future management.
Delta’s Professional Team Provides One-stop Services to Help Customers Establish Customized Smart Green Factory
In the early stages of helping the customer adopt the smart green factory solution, Delta's professional team faced a challenge. Due to the construction in progress, the range and interface of different systems were unclear. To solve that, the team leveraged extensive experience and took an overall perspective. By integrating and standardizing communications, the project was finally on schedule. The project lasted for about two years, and Delta's professional team was an integral part of the whole process. From on-site diagnosis, equipment/platform adoption and setting, test runs, maintenance to technical support, Delta provided the one-stop service that helped the customer solve problems and built the customized smart green factory based on time and cost savings. Looking ahead, if the customer wishes to expand the plant or modify its settings, the flexible and expandable system can integrate seamlessly to increase the extra value of the solution.