RIA STONE
Specialised in Ceramics Pressing
Part of the “Visabeira Group” conglomerate, Ria Stone is a greenfield factory created in 2014, after being awarded a contract by IKEA Sweden for the manufacturing of 486 million tableware products in the timeframe 2014-2026.
Ria Stone manufactures the IKEA worldwide supply of IKEA tableware families Färgrik; Flitighet; Dinera, all products fabricated in the RiaStone factory go through an innovative Industrial ceramics production process: “tableware automated single firing”
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Presently Ria Stone has the urgent need to improve its Overall Production Effectiveness (OPE) Key performance Indicators This improvement ambition requires new approaches to production, by promoting innovative defect management and production control methods, namely in-line inspection technologies, and integration of ICT tools for autonomous, automatic, smart system decision making.
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Problem description
There are several necessary improvements in the manufacturing processes being used today, present inefficiencies are impacting overall production efficiency, and causing significant levels of product rejection (waste to be scrapped) due of insufficient quality of incoming raw matters which are not timely detected by the current quality control inspection systems and processes.
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RiaStone uses and Isostatic Pressing Process, were density and composition of incoming raw matters are key quality drivers. The variations of these factors produce volumetric mass density differences on post-pressing raw greenware (unfired objects, soft and malleable), that directly affect the final quality levels of finished stoneware products.
Quality control (QC) validation techniques being applied today to incoming raw matters from 3rd party suppliers, namely Ceramic pastes are performed only through lot sampling, by using the traditional methods of collecting two ceramic paste samples and performing two separate QC operations:
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A regular chemometric laboratory composition analysis,
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A physical QC test performed in an isostatic press by using the sampled paste to produce a limited quantity of test greenware plate.
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Both QC operations are performed off-line , the immediate in-line and in-realtime and accurate confirmation that incoming ceramic pastes comply with the exact formulas for trouble free production is not possible. The future objective is to improve the quality control and detect the defective products directly on the line in-realtime.
i4Q Solution
The i4Q use case will be implemented at the Ria Stone raw matter Storage and dispensing Silo Units in one of the production lines for stoneware ceramics.
Ria Stone has the ambition of improving the Production Efficiency of its Production Processes, thanks to new and advanced processes that can measure the quality of the incoming Raw Matters inline. The objective is to go from the current status of statistical offline sampling quality control methods to a continuous and complete data driven incoming raw matter quality control.
The Ria Stone use case will guarantee data accuracy, and data veracity for prime matter quality diagnosis through a real time certification system, that will contribute for high manufacturing efficiency and optimal manufacturing quality of finished goods.
This will be achieved through the implementation of a new, in-line QC spectrometry analysis system that will analyse in-line and in-realtime the ceramic pastes incoming from 3rd party suppliers for stoneware manufaturing.
The inline analysis system will produce significant data blocks, that will be incorporated in the E2E (End to End) Factory Data Chain, being processed through the i4Q Data Integration and Qualiy Services, serving data to the i4Q data management tools suite , that include the i4Q Data Analytics Suite, i4Q Analytics Dashboard, and the i4Q Rapid Diagnosis Tools, among others from the i4Q project
The new i4Q quality control data will be physically hosted and processed in the Ria Stone Factory IT Systems and the Cloud , the resulting insight data will be integrated in the Ria Stone Digital Twin simulation and management system.
Expected results
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Increase the Overall Production Effectiveness.
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7,6% increase (from current 92% to expected 99%)
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Increase the overall First Pass Yield.
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7,6% increase (from current 92% to expected 99%)
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Using the new i4Q Quality Control systems, the produce introduced in the firing oven will present zero defects.
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100% products zero defects
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Defective products will be detected through the new i4Q Quality Control systems in the production lines.
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70% increase of raw material reuse rate
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