Read how our MES 4.0 and SCADA implementation led to 7% OEE and 17% MTTR improvements for Littelfuse (Electronics) in just 3 months of installation.

Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and founded in 1927, Littelfuse is a global industrial technology manufacturing company spread across more than 15 countries, to design and deliver innovative, reliable solutions to over 100,000 end customers, in a variety of industrial, transportation, and electronics end markets.

Littelfuse wanted to embark on Industry 4.0 transformation journey across multiple plants. However, they faced challenges with old equipment and many manual processes that inhibited their ability to analyse problems. All these factors lead to weak bottom-line performance with longer time for the Root Cause Analysis (> 1 Week) and poor OEE, MTBF, MTBA and MTTR.

As a corporate strategy Littelfuse wanted to implement standardized Industry 4.0 solution roll out with minimal capex investments across multiple factories having old machines with PLC interfaces such as Allen Bradly, GE Fanuc and Industrial PCs.

In 2019, Liitelfuse chose Cantier as their Industry 4.0 Implementation partner after a successful Proof Of Concept (POC) implementation at one of their Philippines factories.

Initially, 8 machines were connected, and the POC was focused only on real-time OEE and Machine Status monitoring. This led to faster response and improved recovery time after machine failure. The productivity increased by 15% in 4 weeks.

This POC created an opportunity for a factory wide implementation of Cantier MES 4.0 in plants making electronic & semiconductor units.

In one of the factories making electronic products, we have connected 127 machines with Caniter MES 4.0 and SCADA Solutions using OPC UA Standard through the IIoT Gateway. Many of the machines were having Allen Bradly, GE Fanuc PLC based interfaces and Industrial PCs. We were able to connect even some of the machines that are 40+ years old.

With real-time data on Availability, Performance and Quality, Cantier 4.o now provides an accurate view of OEE numbers in the dashboard with drill down capabilities. Littelfuse now can see the improvements immediately after deploying the solution.

Richard Tacla, Engineering Manager said that “The colour coding of the dashboard elements helps us to prioritize the issues and drill down for the details. Technicians can analyse the problem and attend to it immediately. The historical information helps us to learn and apply in the future recovery. With the trends and analysis, we are able to predict the issues in advance and this is driving to minimize the downtime much more than how we used to do before.”

He added “Overall we are able to improve 10% productivity within 3 months of the system is in production. We are expecting to improve further as we continue to use all the functionalities of Cantier MES 4.0.”

Cantier MES 4.0 provides Automatic Downtime monitoring and immediate alerts help them to fix the issues faster. By looking at their computer or the dashboard displays located in their shop floor, Littelfuse can identify the issues and immediately attend to fix it.

Nolito Valeros, Plant Maintenance Manager said, “We have tremendously improved the response and recovery time after implementing Cantier MES 4.0 and SCADA Solution. Previously, it took more than a week to come up with the Analysis Report, now we can generate the report in one click and it helps us to make immediate decision. Predictive maintenance capability of Cantier MES 4.0 Maintenance module is helping us minimize our downtime impressively.”

MTTR, MTBF and MTBA dashboards with real-time information help Littelfuse to keep their factory lean. The current implementation of Usage and Condition based predictive maintenance helps them to predict maintenance activities, create work orders and provide necessary alerts.

With the large volume of data collected Cantier is working on applying our Machine Learning Models to predict maintenance and quality issues at Littelfuse.

At Cantier, we commit ourselves fully to every project to ensure we render the best and most effective services for our clients with our Consult, Connect, Configure & Control methodology for an end-to-end implementation. Littelfuse-Cantier relationship is yet another example of a deep and sustained partnership in the journey of MAKE THEIR FACTORIES SMARTER.