Birlasoft IoT platform for Ready-Mix Cement Industry

Overview

A global building materials company dealing in Ready-Mix Cement (RMX) was looking to improve customer satisfaction, accurately forecast demands, improve operational efficiency, and reduce costs related to logistics and transportation of RMX to their customer's location. The client also wanted to ensure health & safety of its workers by eliminating the need for manual intervention at the site (silos pressure check, replenishment, etc.) and reducing incidents by implementing monitoring and safety controls.

Value Delivered

3% reduction in annual logistics costs

8% reduced incidents through CBM & and Safety Controls

Higher customer satisfaction due to assured product quality

Business Challenges

The client's business was being adversely impacted due to the following challenges -

Demand unpredictability
Operational and health related risks when unloading material from trucks to silos
External/Internal factors used to cause disruption, which negatively influence delivery time and resulted in poor customer satisfaction

Birlasoft Solution

The client partnered with Birlasoft to help them overcome the above challenges and stay ahead of the competition by leveraging the right digital technologies. Birlasoft leveraged its IIoT and Analytics platform called 'intelliAsset for Silos' to automate and transform a critical part of their supply chain to ensure timely delivery of cement to the plants, automated re-ordering, tracking driver behavior, and fleet optimization. intelliAsset for Silos is an IoT, AI/ML and analytics powered digital system that provides benefits to stakeholders throughout the supply chain - Plant / Regional Head, RMX Plant Operator (Batcher / Dispatcher), Health and Safety Officer, Maintenance Engineer, and Supply Chain & Logistics Manager. The solution provided -

Integration with multiple EBM systems and data collection from control layer to enable efficient stock utilization and management
Continuous monitoring of critical sensors, scalable data acquisition, and streaming of high velocity, volume, and variety of near to real-time data
Automated tracking and reordering of cement based on multiple parameters such as cement level in the silo, weather condition, lead time, demand and consumption patterns, etc.
Monitoring of maintenance schedules and automatic capturing of maintenance records for critical equipment

Dashboards for monitoring cement levels, replenishment analytics, plant utilization, etc.
Machine learning based model for replenishment and logistics cost optimization
A mechanism to eliminate health & safety concerns by mitigating operational risks related to silo pressure monitoring and unloading of material from truck to the Silos at the facility

Benefits

Improved Stock Management and Plant Utilization

Improvement in driver behavior and logistics costs reduction

Helped the Company to achieve enhanced safety in plant operations with continuous monitoring of critical sensors and alerts

It facilitated automated preventive maintenance of critical equipment, and safety and cement refilling alerts