Colgate-Palmolive
Canvas Category OEM : Chemical
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🧼 Colgate-Palmolive: Successfully Scaling Technology Worldwide
Colgate-Palmolive’s secret to successfully scaling manufacturing technologies is simple. Don’t have any secrets. Almost a dozen technology pilots currently run on the Colgate side of the company with the results shared freely to anyone in Pruitt’s community of practice. When everyone knows what everyone else is doing, with no secrets about which pilots take place and their results, it’s easy to get plant managers excited and lined up to scale the technologies.
Centrally led discoveries include the Augury predictive maintenance system. Pruitt and his colleague Gary Binstock discovered Augury at the American Manufacturing Summit in Chicago. The wireless predictive maintenance system uses IoT sensors to monitor machine vibration and detect mechanical problems by comparing that information to a database of vibration data gathered from identical machines at other locations.
Or take, for another example, Colgate-Palmolive’s digital twin system, developed in partnership with the software company Twin Thread. Colgate-Palmolive wanted a system that would automatically adjust production parameters based on quality assessment data. After an 18-month development process, Colgate-Palmolive piloted the IIoT-based digital twin at a Hills Pet Nutrition plant in India.
When Pruitt and his team rolled out in North America the Augmentir system that digitizes standard operating procedures (SOPs), work instructions and checklists for operators to review on mobile devices, engineers from plants in India and Vietnam saw the successful deployments in North America and scaled Augmentir to their own plants.
Colgate-Palmolive’s 40-year old veteran who’s just getting started
Colgate-Palmolive Focuses on Machine Health to Improve Supply Chain Operations
Colgate-Palmolive is feeding this wireless sensor data into Augury’s machine health software platform. Pruitt pointed out that this enables Colgate-Palmolive’s machine data to be compared with machine data from more than 80,000 other machines connected to the Augury platform around the world.
“That massive analytical scale brings us insights on how to optimize the performance of equipment and make ever-smarter choices on how and where we deploy it,” Pruitt said. “What’s possible only gets more compelling as this AI solution harnesses more data to create better health outcomes for our machines and our business.”
Providing a specific example of how Augury’s Machine Health system has helped Colgate-Palmolive, Pruitt noted that the system’s AI detected rising temperatures in the drive of a tube maker and alerted the plant team. “Upon inspection, they discovered a problem with the motor’s water cooling system,” he said. “By getting it quickly resolved, we prevented the drive from failing due to overheating, which would’ve stopped the tube production line and incurred replacement costs. We figure the savings at 192 hours of downtime and an output of 2.8 million tubes of toothpaste, plus $12,000 for a new motor and $27,000 in variable conversion costs.”