Everest Textile Achieves Smart Production with WISE-IoT

Leveraging Advantech’s WISE-IoT: IoTSuite, a cloud-native, low-code/no-code industrial IoT development toolset. Everest Textile successfully implemented data visualization management and significantly improved the quality of its waterproof membranes, while realizing its goal of intelligent textile production.

Interview with Richard Tseng , Chief Digital Officer of the Digital Service Center at Everest Textile; Frank Lin, Assistant Vice President of the Technology Research Center at Everest Textile

Because the fashion industry is driven by fast-changing trends and consumer demands, low-volume, high-variety production is essential for clothing manufacturers. To support this demand, the textile industry has begun to shift towards smart manufacturing.

In keeping with its digital transformation strategy, Everest Textile, a leading global textile manufacturer, is committed to promoting Industry 4.0 and implementing smart manufacturing processes. Accordingly, the company collaborated with Advantech to build a smart digital production line and optimize its production processes in order to improve product quality, yield rates, and factory management.

Advantech is a Crucial Industry 4.0 Partner for Everest Textile

Established more than 30 years ago, Everest Textile now reports annual revenues in excess of 10 billion TWD. In addition to actively investing in the R&D of textile technology, the company is renowned for producing innovative high-value products. Moreover, since announcing its Industry 4.0 strategy in 2014, Everest Textile has continued to implement related initiatives aimed at maintaining its competitive advantage.

According to Mr. Tseng, Chief Digital Officer of the Digital Service Center at Everest Textile, “Innovation and sustainability have always been the company’s key development goals.” He further asserted that the key to realizing innovation and sustainability is smart manufacturing, and the digitalization of production processes is crucial for promoting smart manufacturing. He also commented that with Advantech’s assistance, Everest Textile has been making significant progress.

Referring to Everest Textile’s implementation of Advantech’s WISE-IoT: IoTSuite in 2019, Mr. Tseng stated that in the past, data from setting and dyeing machines was disorganized and scattered across various factory systems. To consolidate this information, all data had to be transcribed and input manually, which was not only time-consuming but also prone to error and data losses. These issues tended to result in time wasting at workstations and suboptimal production schedules.

After adopting Advantech’s highly-flexible IoTSuite services on WISE-STACK 300 rack-level private cloud, Everest Textile was able to create an application framework service capable of collecting data from over 100 machines in order to realize a fully digital smart textile manufacturing production line. This not only optimized operations and improved process transparency, but also made knowledge transfers easier and more systematic for employees.

Two-Pronged Approach to Visualization and Membrane Optimization

With Advantech’s assistance, Everest Textile has realized two major achievements — production management visualization and membrane quality optimization. In regards to the production of the high-performance waterproof membranes, Frank Lin, Assistant Vice President of the Technology Research Center at Everest Textile, explained that Everest Textile has developed predictive quality analytics and warning systems by collecting and analyzing relevant data parameters in membrane production. This has allowed them to visualize the entire process and significantly improve membrane production. Moreover, their digitalization efforts are expected to increase membrane sales by 50% in the next three years.

In addition, Everest Textile has also installed cameras to capture images of release paper during the gluing process. An automated optical inspection system combined with intelligent image analysis technology is then used to determine the quality of the release paper in real time, with all resulting data transmitted to the WISE-IoT: IoTSuite.

This provides production line operators a clear overview of the product status and quality, helping to minimize error and defect rates, which minimizes overall wastage. With the automated optical inspection system offering 99% detection accuracy, the quantity of defective membrane products is expected to decline by at least 10%.

Mr. Tseng commented that “Everest Textile collaborated with Advantech because of its outstanding software and hardware capabilities and customer service. With Advantech’s assistance, Everest Textile has significantly enhanced its smart manufacturing capabilities, improving production yield rates by up to 90% and OEE to 88%. This gives Everest Textile the confidence to continue its smart development and push toward increased growth and transformation.”

Solution Benefits

• Automated optical inspection (AOI) system offered 99% detection accuracy
• Damaged membrane products reduced by at least 10%
• Production yield rate improved by up to 90%
• Membrane sales expected to increase 50% in three years