German glassmaker Wiegand-Glas has approved the use of the Tiama IQ track intelligent software, designed to provide real-time plants’ performance data.

The glassmaker has adopted the technology at its four plants in Steinbach am Wald, Großbreitenbach, Schleusingen and Ernstthal. Each day it produces more than eight million glass containers for the beverage and food industries.

Managing Director, Oliver Wiegand, approved the technology at the beginning of May after a three-month trial.

The group has always been an early technology adopter so it came as a logical choice to take advantage from all a digitised glass plant environment can offer.

The IQ’s role is to deliver targeted Key Performance Indicators (KPI) from the four plants. With the IQ’s view-at-a-glance dashboard, plant managers of the four facilities can focus on critical trends anytime, anywhere leading to timely, better decision making.

Besides helping to develop an efficient quality programme immediately by placing the right kind of information at fingertips, the IQ Track can also be described as a smart tool offering internal benchmark possibilities: multi-furnace, multi-line, multi-article and multi-plant.

The latter was a Wiegand’s priority as the management has to coordinate over the different sites. There is a focus on articles and job histories allowing management to have a quick view of the container produced and their key metrics.

“We did market research and could not find any other system like the Tiama IQ track. We now have one system covering the four plants,” said Mr Wiegand.

The Tiama IQ range was designed to offer monitoring tools scalable to various geographies and functions. Its solutions have been less about compiling data and more about compressing it into meaningful information.

This new step towards intelligent performance monitoring reinforces the Wiegand-Glas and Tiama cooperation that started in 1995.