French Pharmaceutical company manages equipment and prevents shutdowns with Senzary solutions

UPSA adopts Senzary’s RotaryIQ solution for predictive maintenance and remote machine management.

UPSA, a pharmaceutical company in France, joins Industry 4.0 after implementing Senzary’s Rotary IQ solution for predictive maintenance and remote machine management. UPSA is one of the largest pharmaceutical industrial sites in Europe.

They have been committed to the daily lives of patients and pharmacists for over 85 years, developing and manufacturing medicine to relieve pain and mild ailments of everyday life. Present in over 60 countries, including countries in Europe, French-speaking Africa and Vietnam, UPSA exports nearly 40% of its international volumes each year from Agen, France.

This huge commitment to patients and pharmacists requires a reliable facility, and predictive maintenance solutions are some of the best to ensure that manufacturers remain in production and reduce losses.

The UPSA laboratory produces 15 boxes of prescription drugs every second, with effervescents being their main focus. Producing effervescents requires clean areas with dry air and workshops under overpressure in order to avoid risks of health contamination. Because of this, production sites are equipped with several air handling units, or AMUs.

Recently, UPSA identified an imbalance through RotaryIQs database, which prompted a planned repair. Thankfully, there was minimum impact on production, saving the company thousands of dollars.

At the end of May 2020, during a review of the dashboards of the machines monitored by Asystom, the teams noted that an AHU had a balancing problem. This early information made it possible to plan an intervention during the next technical shutdown, with minimum impact on production. Now, their maintenance is scheduled during technical shutdowns so that breakdowns are prevented. This has helped the UPSA team feel confident. They now know what to look out for, thanks to training and continuous support from Asystom and Senzary.

To limit additional costs due to unplanned shutdowns, the laboratory was looking to equip itself with a predictive maintenance solution that would allow it to monitor its machines closely and anticipate possible breakdowns. UPSA selected the solution proposed by Asystom, which caught their attention because it has the easiest installation of all wireless solutions on the market!

“Since installing the solution from Asystom, we can continuously monitor the condition of the fans of the equipped air handling units. If we realize that one of the fans is drifting, it is now possible for us to carry out preventive maintenance operations during a scheduled technical shutdown: in short, we can carry out repairs, so that the breakdown does not happen ”, specifies Mr Bourroux.

In the end, Senzary helped UPSA save 50k euros, and now can avoid unplanned shutdowns.

“Personally, I see several advantages to using the solution developed by Asystom. On the one hand, it allows us to avoid the additional costs associated with an uncontrolled production shutdown and emergency repairs. Beyond this significant financial aspect, I also see a real effect on the motivation of the teams: Asystom supports our technicians step by step and trains them to develop their skills in vibration analysis, in order to make them as autonomous as possible.

During installation, Asystom taught them how to position the beacons, how best to configure them to adapt their operation to the machine they supervise, etc. They are then trained in the use of the solution itself (setting of alerts and trigger rules, interpretation of analytical curves, etc). They feel truly valued by this contribution of new technology as well as by the gaining of new skill sand knowledge.

Finally, there is clearly a de-stressing effect: we have better control of the installations, we can prevent breakdowns, which makes it possible to avoid emergency interventions, which are more prone to accidents,” finishes Mr. Bourroux, Infrastructure Maintenance Manager at UPSA.