Adopting DISA’s Monitizer^® Suite has rapidly transformed Spanish foundry group Condals’ access to foundry data. Monitizer | DISCOVER’s customised dashboards now deliver a unified, real-time view of process information while Monitizer | PRESCRIBE’s Artificial Intelligence-driven recommendations have helped cut scrap by up to 45%.

“Our goal is to be a data-driven company,” says David de la Cruz, CIO at Condals Group. “We already have a lot of data. We wanted to get more value out of it and for our people to have one single source of information, so we had specific challenges that Monitizer could help us solve.”

Monitizer supports any foundry at any stage of its digital journey, whether they are novices or experts. They can start by collecting data, then move quickly to more sophisticated digital applications – gaining value at each step.

Monitizer | DISCOVER came next, able to collect data from any vendor’s equipment across multiple foundries, lines or sites, and present KPIs within personalised dashboards in real time. The foundry previously spent days cleansing and merging data from different systems to achieve an overall process view and calculate important derived variables like cumulative totals of iron poured; DISCOVER’s automatic calculations and data integration make most of this processing unnecessary.

“Monitizer | DISCOVER will give us real-time data to work with right now that is also stored so we can work with it afterwards,” says de la Cruz. “We wanted a single standard data source that everyone could trust and access. Before, the same analysis could give different answers depending on how the data set was brought together and the time period under consideration.”

The DISA team audited the available data and identified the sources. The team used NoriGates (Edge Gateways) to securely collect and transport data to DISCOVER’s cloud database from a wide range of sources across Condals’ three lines.

All deployment and testing took place during the Covid pandemic, so Monitizer’s remote access capability was vital.

Condals currently has 12 systems connected to Monitizer | DISCOVER in Spain, with almost 2000 different data points available through over 40 different dashboards. In Slovakia, there’s currently two connected systems supplying over 500 data points to six dashboards.

Dashboards in both locations display real-time metrics customised for each user. For example, a machine operator might see the current line speed while managers might prefer average speeds over the last hour, the last shift or the previous day. One popular dashboard option displays all the important process data related to castings created from a single pattern, with an “end of batch” report summarising each run.

“Now anyone can connect and see the data from anywhere,” enthuses de la Cruz. “We can collect and combine the data much faster than before and that makes analysis faster too. Managers, supervisors and operators, many now have their own personalised dashboard view based on their role. We can configure the dashboards and KPIs on our own most of the time, with DISA always ready to support us remotely.”

“I can for sure recommend the complete Monitizer package,” concludes de la Cruz. “We already had Monitizer | CIM installed and that had worked well for us. Monitizer | DISCOVER lets us do a lot of additional things and is a really powerful tool for putting all our data in one central place and making it easily available.”