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January 31, 2023

Husky Technologies’ remote-monitoring solution delivers real-time predictability and reduces operating costs

Since its start in Bolton, Ontario, Canada, in 1953, Husky Technologies™ has pioneered industry-leading injection molding technologies to meet the essential needs of the global consumer goods packaging and medical markets. The expertise and service commitment of Husky employees in more than 40 locations supports customers in more than 140 countries through a global network of manufacturing facilities and technical and monitoring centers. To provide a more proactive approach to customer service, Husky developed Advantage+Elite™, a proactive, predictive, transparent monitoring solution that comes standard on its beverage packaging and medical injection molding systems. Based on Azure IoT, this solution combines a deep historical database of service expertise with real-time data and advanced processing analytics to anticipate, recognize, and resolve potential production issues before they affect productivity or product quality. This approach reduces the need for emergency service calls and shortens their duration. Husky estimates that the solution saves customers an average of USD 4,000 to 6,000 per intervention.

Husky Technologies

“Azure IoT helps us meet our system performance needs and maintain service levels for our customers. It scales quickly as we onboard new Advantage+Elite customers and reduces the time and resources spent on infrastructure maintenance.”

Phil Kinson, Director, Service Contracts, Husky Technologies

Addressing new challenges

Whether it’s an injection device for life-saving vaccines, food and beverage containers, consumer goods packaging, or automotive products, it’s highly likely that Husky equipment has produced it. As a premium supplier of injection molding systems worldwide, Husky designs, manufactures, and supports the equipment that produces those products. Husky already has more than 13,000 systems in operation around the globe, and its commitment to high performance, efficiency, reliability, and sustainability continues to grow and evolve with changing manufacturing requirements and practices. 

Today’s manufacturing customers face many challenges. There is a growing demand to produce more parts and a larger variety of parts on the same equipment. Increased focus on sustainable packaging means that customers want to increase the amount of recycled material that they use, which introduces a significant degree of variability into the process. There is a shortage of skilled workers, so manufacturers face a constant challenge to train and retain workers. At the same time, manufacturers are adopting Industry 4.0 technologies such as the Industrial Internet of things (IIoT), cloud computing, and AI and machine learning to automate processes and drive better-informed business decisions. 

Husky has long been known for manufacturing and installing production systems that deliver a high level of performance throughout their life cycle. For more than two decades, its sensor monitoring has captured process information including temperature, pressure, line speed, positioning, and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) on its customers’ equipment to help optimize production and product quality. To accomplish this, a server running Husky’s proprietary Shotscope™ 4.0 real-time plant-monitoring software was installed next to each machine to capture the most critical parameters for that piece of equipment.

Because the data was stored on the local machine, if the sensors detected a value that exceeded machine specifications, the issue might go undetected until a technician on the customer site noticed and requested support. Husky customer support would then work with the technician to diagnose the problem, either by phone or with a service visit, and then order the necessary parts to fix it. Although Husky prides itself on stringent attention to customer support, this reactive process could still result in unplanned downtime and emergency service costs. 

Taking a proactive approach

In 2019, Husky recognized the need to take a more proactive and predictive approach to supporting its customers. Husky developers started by centralizing decades of knowledge acquired from subject matter experts into a new service model that included the development of the Husky Genius knowledge management system. Then they used a dedicated team to dig deeper into the data. 

“We first looked at the main reasons why our customers experience downtime, loss of performance, or loss of efficiency,” says Phil Kinson, Director, Service Contracts at Husky Technologies. “Then we looked at what leading variables captured from monitoring the machine could have provided an early warning that those issues were going to occur.” 

Over the next two years, Husky developed and pilot-tested the solution, which enables Husky to monitor customer equipment in real time and contact the customer when a potential problem is identified. As part of the pilot test, Husky moved to Azure from its previous cloud platform to support new functional and scalability requirements. 

The pilot included six customers in different parts of the world. Each customer had a 12-month validation period during which Husky established the capabilities, proved the execution steps, and assessed the solution’s ability to significantly reduce unplanned downtime and the costs associated with emergency service interventions. 

It took another year to commercialize the solution, now known as the Husky Advantage+Elite proactive, predictive, transparent monitoring system. Using Azure services, including Azure IoT Hub, Azure Data Explorer, and Azure Synapse Analytics, Advantage+Elite monitors and analyzes leading variables from customers’ operational technology (OT) production systems in real time. 

“Azure IoT helps us meet our system performance needs and maintain service levels for our customers,” says Kinson. “It scales quickly as we onboard new Advantage+Elite customers and reduces the time and resources spent on infrastructure maintenance.” 

Azure provides an end-to-end approach for the secure provisioning of devices, secure connectivity between devices and the cloud, and securing data in the cloud. Azure Synapse Analytics combines data integration, data warehousing, and big data analytics to make data and critical insights easily accessible to both technical and business decision makers through Power BI dashboards. And Azure Data Explorer provides out-of-the-box functions for real-time data analysis on large volumes of streaming data. 

To encourage the collaboration of OT and IT in creating this solution, Husky formed a separate New Service Model team. This team consists of subject matter experts with many years of experience in technical support, in addition to data analysts who monitor data trends and generate data algorithms that can monitor hundreds of variables on hundreds of machines simultaneously. 

“We estimate that each 'We Call You' intervention saves the customer an average of $4,000 to $6,000, depending on the specific circumstances.”

Phil Kinson, Director, Service Contracts, Husky Technologies

Applying effective, predictive maintenance

Advantage+Elite provides round-the-clock, remote monitoring of customers’ systems from six global monitoring centers. This remote monitoring enables Husky technicians to anticipate, identify, and resolve potential issues before they affect the customer’s productivity or part quality. Some of the data is available to customers on their machines and some of the data is proprietary to Husky. 

“Our dashboards consume this data and provide a health score for every system being monitored,” says Kinson. “When the health score falls, we initiate a ‘We Call You’ notification to the customer champion.” The notification includes the nature of the problem, the potential impact to their business, and the next steps to resolve the issue in the event of a safety or other critical issue that could cause immediate part failure.

Expanding the knowledge base

Insights gained from Advantage+Elite may be used to transfer knowledge to customer maintenance staff and to help Husky improve its product and service offerings. 

Every week, the program manager (PM) for each customer meets with the customer and reviews actual versus target levels of machine performance relative to the events of the previous week. “The PM provides insights into the way the customer operates their equipment and suggests things that they can do to improve performance,” says Kinson.

Customers have said that what they learn from the interventions and weekly calls helps improve the skill set of their maintenance teams. It gives them a deeper understanding of how they can use the equipment successfully. 

“Our learnings are not only helping to ensure the success of our customers and optimize maintenance planning, but they are also helping us to design our equipment with improved serviceability to drive improved performance and a lower cost of ownership for our customers,” says Kinson.

Optimizing production, reducing costs

The value of having proactive insights into the operation of customer equipment is a big advantage for both Husky and its customers. It helps Husky address potential failures before they happen, thus saving its customers significant, costly downtime. It reduces the need for emergency service calls, and when they do occur, they are resolved in less than half the time. And it helps eliminate unnecessary service visits because Advantage+Elite provides Husky service technicians with a deeper understanding of the problem ahead of time, so they can visit just once with the correct part and quickly resolve the problem. “We estimate that each 'We Call You' intervention saves the customer an average of $4,000 to $6,000, depending on the specific circumstances,” says Kinson.

The predictive nature of Advantage+Elite also means that Husky customers can replace parts based on actual use. This helps save the cost of replacing perfectly good parts before it’s necessary and further reduces costs. 

Husky also credits Azure with increasing the efficiency of its IT operations staff. “Azure saves us a lot of time by offering end-to-end monitoring support for applications, infrastructure, and the network,” says Jean-Christophe Witz, Chief Information Officer for Husky. “The Azure Synapse Analytics ecosystem also simplifies security setup and provisioning and provides the ability to control which devices can connect to our infrastructure.” 

Recycling for a sustainable future

Another area where Advantage+Elite is providing noticeable improvement is in the use of recycled material. Many customers are trying to increase the amount of recycled material they use, but the variability of the recycled resin introduces a huge degree of variability into the process. 

“The variability of recycled material means you have to control the things you can control on the machine far tighter than you could in the past,” says Kinson. “Through Advantage+Elite, we are able to monitor and predict, based on the batch of different resins going in, what adjustments the customer needs to make to maintain consistent quality with a much higher percentage of recycled material. And we show customers how they can optimize it without affecting their production volumes.” 

Today, Advantage+Elite remotely monitors systems 24 hours a day in 65 countries, communicating in customers’ local languages. “Customer service remains our top priority,” says Tony Black, President, Service at Husky Technologies. “Advantage+Elite, combined with our front-line service engineers around the world, is enabling us to make step change improvements in the support we provide to our customers to maximize their system investment.”  

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