A step towards digitalization: new technologies for a high-value tracking

For some time now, we have been talking about industry 4.0: a series of company actions that aims to improve the internal production system. A path recently undertaken by Dema Fertilizers too, which involves investments, changes, renewals in favour of greater productivity and more competitiveness.

What is industry 4.0? 

The fourth industrial revolution - named so since 2015 - translates into an increasingly concrete use of technologies inside companies, defining a partnership between physical and digital systems. An internal transformation that brings with it a substantial change in the production methods, integrating new technologies able to optimize and improve the production system.

Why is digital transformation important?

In addition to ensuring greater productivity and a consequent reduction of errors, the primary requirement of our company has always been to provide a high-quality product guaranteeing a transparent production process: the use of new technologies comes to the rescue, tracing every single movement that takes place during the production cycle. In fact, our objectives for the digitalization are:

• accurately keep track of all wares and semifinished products movements, within the production plant,
• simplify and automate all internal company procedures.

Furthermore, we make collection and communication of data possible, through the integration between machines and ERP and MES management systems. This allows us to acquire a huge quantity of information as: production data, downtime, machine status, product quality, analysis of the plant KPIs and inefficiencies, all relevant and useful information in order to maintain a high-quality product standard.

How do we contribute to our company digitalization? 

We have installed a Radio Frequency Identification system (RFID) for data processing, that has made it possible to create a data stream. The aim is to guarantee a complete traceability of the finished product: an adjustment of production in order to identify each individual commodity, product or pallet within the production site.

In other words, for a better connection and management of the entire production cycle, RFID tags are applied on each load unit, generating a virtual product made of data passing through the plant to the outside – these are production data, as quantity, lot and so on – following all the movements of the real product. Finally, passing through the doors equipped with RFID readers, we are able to record the outbound products.

The 4^th industrial revolution in our company 

The decision of reducing the digital gap in the face of an openness to digital transformation, projects us in a future increasingly open to adopting new technologies. With an internal tracking process that involves the entire production cycle, we are committed to be more productive every day, reducing risks, errors or the wasting of time, but above all to constantly provide a valuable product.