Leading UK injection moulding company on the Intouch i4 Cloud

Intouch Monitoring believe that all manufacturers should have the tools to make the best production decisions. Intouch has spent more than 20 years ensuring that their system gives users the visibility and control to easily make decisions which consistently lead to significant improvements in OEE and profitability.

With no upfront cost, scalable and accessible immediately via the internet, the subscription-based Intouch i4 Cloud is a system that starts saving money from the first day of implementation. Customers are able to try the production monitoring, scheduling, reporting and analytics system completely risk free and expand it as required. Extremely easy to use, the system can be implemented on new or legacy machines and integrated with any ERP system.

Plastics Parts Direct

Plastics Parts Direct, a leading UK injection moulding company specialising in processing thermoplastics for a variety of industries, installed the Intouch i4 Cloud earlier this year in all its 14 machines. They opted for the Intouch i4 Cloud as the low initial investment meant the lowest financial risk.

Joe Bowes, Director of Plastics Parts Direct:

"We knew we had holes in our productivity and the obvious solution was to install a system that could analyse real time data. We could then use this data to plug some of these holes.

It was also very important we didn’t overload ourselves with information and risk becoming less efficient by trying to tackle too many issues at once."

Since implementing Intouch, Monday morning start up times have improved by 1 hour across all machines, cycle times have improved by 5-8%, uptime has been significantly improved and the real-time data has led them to make effective productivity decisions:

"One machine in particular was underperforming, mainly due to its age. We cross referenced with the same tools running on other machines over a period of time which confirmed there was an issue. This prompted us to buy a new machine to replace this one and instantly we saw an increase of 30% in efficiency and cycle times and a reduction in power consumption too.

One of our biggest savings is downtime during normal production. Previously machines could be left for 5-10 minutes before being noticed which led to another 10-15 minutes warm up time and re-start time. Now they are attended to instantly eliminating the need to wait to restart. All production staff have bought into the system and what it has to offer as, along with the obvious interest side of things, it has proven to save them time and effort throughout their shift and they also have a tendency to be more competitive about keeping the screen green!."