Intertape Polymer Group (IPG)
OEM : Plastics and Rubber
Intertape Polymer Group Inc. is a recognized leader in the development, manufacture and sale of a variety of paper and film based pressure-sensitive and water-activated tapes, stretch and shrink films, protective packaging, woven and non-woven products and packaging machinery for industrial and retail use. Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec and Sarasota, Florida, IPG employs approximately 3,700 employees with operations in 32 locations, including 21 manufacturing facilities in North America, five in Asia and one in Europe.
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2021 IW Best Plants Winner: IPG Tremonton Wraps Up a Repeat IW Best Plants Win
“If you wrapped it and just wound it straight, it would look like a record, with peaks and valleys,” says Richardson. So instead, the machines rotate horizontally, like two cans of pop on turntables. Initially, IPG used a gauge that indicated whether the film was too thick or too thin. “That was OK,” says Richardson, “but it didn’t get us the information we needed.”
Working with an outside company, IPG Tremonton upgraded the gauge to one that could quantify the thickness of the cut plastic in real time as the machine operates.
The benefits of the tinkering were twofold. First, the upgrade gave operators the ability to correct deviations on the fly. Second, “we found that we had some variations between a couple of our machines,” Richardson says. Using the new gauge on both machines revealed that one of them was producing film “a few percentage points thicker” than its twin. “We [were] basically giving away free product,” Richardson recalled. The new sensor gave IPG the information it needed to label film more accurately.
Strategic Analytics Help Intertape Polymer Shrink Inefficiencies
For Intertape Polymer Group (IPG), a global manufacturer of packaging and protective solutions for industrial and e-commerce applications, the digital transformation process has always been about embracing technology with a keen eye on extracting the overall business value. As such, IPG is currently at different levels of maturity across the portfolio of digital technology deployments, including additive manufacturing, AR/VR training, IoT-based predictive downtime and robotic process automation.
IPG has taken advantage of the unique data modeling capabilities of the Sight Machine platform, which continuously transforms all data types generated by factory equipment and manufacturing software into a robust data foundation for analyzing and modeling a plant’s machines, production processes and finished products.