Driven by high demand for faster and more efficient production, Industry 4.0 spending growth is expected to reach US$300 billion by 2023. This data comes from IoT Analytics' Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing report, indicating that Predictive maintenance technologies are among the main use cases of Industry 4.0.During the last five years, WEG has developed its own digitization portfolio to meet its growing demand.Before the launch of the WEG Digital business unit in 2019, WEG was exclusively oriented to the manufacture of industrial hardware.Headquartered in Brazil and operating subsidiaries in 36 countries, WEG has enjoyed respectable consideration for its 1,200 product lines that include motors, actuators, generators, transformers, and automation products.In fact, WEG boasts of having the largest electric motor manufacturing plant in the world, manufacturing an enormous number of 70,000 electric motors per day.As an international manufacturer, WEG is aware of the needs and requests of its customers and its industrial advantages.Among its biggest challenges is the implementation of technology for performance optimization.Like many industrial facilities, WEG has applied a predictive maintenance methodology.As its name indicates, it is a periodic and routine maintenance of the equipment.Typically, for example, motor bearings can be lubricated every six months and completely replaced every five years, regardless of normal wear and tear on the asset."In our own plant, we are spending an enormous amount of time and money on preventive maintenance," said Trenton Roncato Juraszek, mechanical project analyst at WEG.“However, we are still experiencing some unforeseen breakdowns and subsequent service interruptions, forcing us to carry out costly corrective maintenance.We knew that our clients must also be experiencing the same problems and we were aware that the solution lay in having better data.”WEG began to delve into digitization in 2017 with the development of the WEG Motor Scan.This device is a physical sensor that is installed in a motor or a peripheral actuator, compressor or fan, to monitor vibrations, temperature and performance, among other parameters.The sensor is fixed by means of a screw to the fins of the motor, so it is not necessary to make any electrical connection.The flexibility of the sensor was essential and fundamental for WEG to be able to obtain the data from the existing equipment.Like most manufacturers, the plant's equipment varied in age, with different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and communications protocols, so acquiring the data directly was not always possible.This level of scalability was essential to achieve WEG's objective, which was the total management of assets through digital technologies.WEG Motor Scan was launched with WEG Motor Scan Gateway, a technology that allows data from autonomous motors to be sent to the cloud, via Wi-Fi, Ethernet or a 3G or 4G connection.WEG Motor Scan Gateway was vital to achieve remote monitoring of electric motors equipped with sensors.Finally, the launch pad represented the next phase of WEG's digital portfolio.Following the successful implementation of WEG Motor Scan, WEG developed WEG Motion Fleet Management (MFM), a tool that allows for a more advanced level of data management on the performance of existing motors.The MFM tool uses the data provided by WEG Motor Scan Gateway to generate real-time information on asset performance, offering maintenance teams a holistic view of the entire installation and its respective assets.“By regularly collecting data, the MFM generates valuable insights for maintenance teams about the current status of plant assets,” explained Juraszek.“Consequently, this reduces the need for preventive maintenance programs and allows maintenance engineers to easily see which assets are showing signs of wear or abnormal behavior, allowing them to identify critical issues and act accordingly.The entire platform is designed around ease of use.Including custom navigation settings for each user, as well as numerous reports, gauge dashboards, charts, and data history.For maintenance engineers it establishes an optimal way of managing workflow, and for plant managers it provides an overview of the performance of the entire plant.After its development, the MFM was implemented in one of WEG's electric motor facilities based in Jaraguá do Sul, Brazil.The facility is responsible for the production of 8,000 engines a day and the MFM has been instrumental in improving the maintenance of this facility.After its success, around 1,378 sensors have been implemented in just one of WEG's manufacturing plants in order to enable the MFM tool.“The scalability of WEG's digital portfolio allows us to use the MFM tool to integrate performance data across numerous plants and assets,” Juraszek continued.“In WEG's compressor center at our Jaragua do Sul factory, we integrate the data of each asset, including motors, frequency inverters, pressure sensors, PLCs and gateways.This allows us to use autonomous maintenance at this facility.”Part of this autonomy is possible thanks to another WEG digital tool: WEG Motor Specialist.Developed after WEG Motor Scan, this tool introduces artificial intelligence and machine learning into the toolkit to further improve predictive maintenance.WEG Motor Specialist intelligently learns the operating patterns of a motor during its operation, detecting any indicator of unbalance, misalignment, load or consumption.Instead of relying on an engineer to input tolerances on a motor or industrial asset, this technology uses historical data to know when it is operating in unusual ways.A good example of operation is winding temperature.The system can provide a prediction of the internal motor winding temperature by performing calculations based on the surface temperature measurement.If the system determines that the winding is at risk of overheating, it automatically alerts the engineer to physically inspect the motor and decide exactly what to do.The implementation of MFM and WEG's digital portfolio in its own facilities has been extremely positive.Maintenance engineers can work more efficiently, plant managers have more vigilance, and service outages have been greatly reduced.“After the installation of MFM in WEG's wire factory in Brazil, we have achieved annual savings of about 4 million US dollars per year,” said Juraszek.“This was made possible by a 33 percent reduction in the overall losses we previously had due to unforeseen service outages.It should be noted that we were also able to postpone some planned investments for new equipment, which benefited the balance of the business.Thanks to the improvements in the maintenance plan, where repairs and replacement of equipment are carried out only when necessary, we were able to make better use of the equipment we already had and extend its useful life”, concluded Juraszek.With the creation of the WEG Digital business unit, WEG has demonstrated its commitment to the development and progress of its digital offerings.As with all of its technologies and equipment, WEG follows a vertical system in which it uses its own motors, actuators, technologies and software whenever possible.Industry 4.0 is a growing market, and as preventive maintenance technologies drive this expansion, WEG will continue to develop new digital tools to meet its own and its customers' needs.The most relevant information in your email.News, reports, digital magazine, podcasts and more.