A big step toward data driven factories at Poclain

One major trend of Industry 4.0 is about connecting equipment and collecting tons of data. But the key success factor is to put humanity at the center and to turn all these data into levers contributing to Operational Excellence.

5 min read

Poclain Data Hub system

“The main challenge is to control the diversity of data generators and to design a scalable architecture simplifying data collection from existing assets and accompany our growth.” highlights Rija Rakotoarisoa.
“It is based on this observation that the ‘Shopfloor Datahub’ initiative was born. The goal was to set-up a standard solution in all Poclain’s factories allowing the connection of physical and digital assets, as well as the collection and transformation of the data.”

From solutions benchmark and Proof of Concept in its Digital Lab, to the effective deployment in all nine factories, it took POCLAIN less than ten months to create what becomes the real backbone of the plants digitalization. This fast-paced project has been possible thanks to an innovative deployment methodology that allows task parallelization and shorter implementation time. The Data Hub is today a key enabler to automate data collection, consolidation, visualization and inter-connection of equipment and software all over the shopfloors. Over twelve use cases are in production. It also comes with savings in efficiency, with better data integrity and visibility to allow for the creation of actionable data. ‘Data driven’ decisions are much simpler for plants leadership.

The results

Adoption of this system by the plants has been progressive. Spending less time in collecting, cleaning, sorting, but also questioning the data allows to switch the focus to deeper analysis and data-based problems resolution. The first successful use cases call for more and more requests – implementation times are shortened thanks to this robust backbone!

Rija RAKOTOARISOA

IT shopfloor Manager
Poclain Hydraulics