Mondi Gronau is a leading international manufacturer of packaging and paper products. The company’s plastic production plant delivers about 18 million tons of plastic and thin film products annually. The plant’s 900 workers operate approximately 60 plastic extrusion, printing, gluing, and winding machines 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Machine failures that result in downtime and wasted raw materials cost Mondi millions of euros each month. To minimize these costs and maximize plant efficiency, Mondi developed a health monitoring and predictive maintenance application. The application uses advanced statistics and machine learning algorithms to identify potential issues with the machines, enabling workers to take corrective action and prevent serious problems.
Mondi developed the application in MATLAB®with support from MathWorks Consulting and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas König, holder of the Chair for Integrated Sensor Systems (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern).
“As a manufacturing company we don’t have data scientists with machine learning expertise, but MathWorks provided the tools and technical knowhow that enabled us to develop a production preventative maintenance system in a matter of months,” says Dr. Michael Kohlert, head of information management and process automation at Mondi.