CASE STUDY
Alumil | Aluminium Extrusion with N5Nitrogen
Alumil is one of the most advanced companies globally owning state-of-the art production lines in their 12 factories in Europe (www.alumil.com). Through their modern production facilities and stringent quality controls throughout the production line, they ensure the creation of superior products with high added value. Alumil wanted to increase the productivity and the quality of the profile by applying liquid nitrogen technology: with Atieuno services and N5 Nitrogen the productivity was increased by 32%, significantly improving the quality of the profiles.
Challenges
Alumil aimed to improve significantly its extrusion process by applying liquid nitrogen technology and re-designing some die to maximize the benefits granted by N5 Nitrogen system, in cooperation with the die supplier. The goal was to increase productivity and quality, freeing production capacity and improving the competitive advantage. How product helped.
N5 Nitrogen was implemented as follows:
- Installation of N5 Nitrogen software
- Re-design of the die
- Trial sessions for a couple of weeks with temporary LIN infrastructure
- Installation of final LIN infrastructure
- Analysis and Validation of the results One of the main goals was to facilitate the daily operations, ensuring complete control over the technology and maximizing the benefits granted.
The entire project, including implementation, Go Live and User Training lasts about five months, while the implementation of the system only required a couple of weeks. An additional challenge to be faced was due to Covid-19, forcing us to perform the final startup remotely, ensuring the usual standard level of quality. Data Management & Traceability N5 Nitrogen saves all the production data and creates the recipes by die-alloy, making all the data available to any other system. The recipes are automatically set to the PLCs to ensure the highest repeatability.
Results, Return on Investment and Future Plans
“WE ARE ACHIEVING RECORD HIGH PRODUCTIVITIES WITH N5NITROGEN AND THE SUPPORT OF ATIEUNO INFORMATICA” Alexandros Salpingidis, Alumil Corporate Operations Director
Atieuno has worked side-by-side with Alumil staff to maximize the benefits and grant full repeatability: both targets have been achieved, increasing the productivity by 32% and stabilizing the production, with ROI calculated in terms of months.
Following steps have been mutual efforts to improve constantly the results, as per the methodology of continuous improvement. Alumil now plans to apply the technology to as many dies as possible and, parallelly, the system has been implemented on a production line of the Serbian facility as well.
