Abrasives Line Achieved 100% Real-Time OEE Visibility
How a global engineered-materials manufacturer turned an opaque, four-floor micro-grit process into a fully tracked, real-time material and OEE view.
Situation
A sophisticated process, run on experience and manual tracking
The client is a global leader in engineered materials, operating across abrasives, electrominerals, and ceramics, and wanted to digitize one of its high-volume micro-grit manufacturing units. The plant produces silicon carbide micro-grits through a complex process spread across multiple floors: raw materials move through silos, multi-stage crushing, mesh sorting, and sizing lines, ultimately generating several fractions of finished product.
Despite the sophistication of the process itself, the plant still relied heavily on experience-based decisions and manual tracking to run it.
At a Glance
Complication
Five compounding gaps, confronted at once
Lack of material flow transparency
No system existed to accurately compute infeed and outfeed from silo weights, so material balance was essentially a guess.
Frequent reprocessing
Incorrect or delayed data caused material to be re-fed into the system unnecessarily, quietly consuming capacity and energy.
No real-time OEE visibility
Availability, performance, and quality were not tracked live, so the plant's single most important efficiency metric simply did not exist in real time.
Idle and overloaded lines undetected
Teams had no way to tell, in the moment, when a line was sitting idle or running past safe capacity.
Manual batch tracking
Batch completion and key parameters were determined by hand, introducing delay and inconsistency into every handoff.
Resolution
Precise, continuous material tracking — for the first time
Comprehensive assessment
Delpheon Lite began by mapping the entire multi-floor process — silos, feeders, crushers, mesh sorters, sizing lines — to identify exactly where digital capture points needed to sit.
Real-time sensors & manual plan capture
Sensors were connected for output weight, runtime, and downtime, while manual entry forms captured the production plan itself.
Automated infeed–outfeed computation
The core innovation: silo-weight delta logic. A positive delta between readings signaled infeed, a negative delta signaled outfeed — giving the plant precise, continuous material tracking for the first time.
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Shift-, day- & month-wise OEE
Computed using a combination of real-time machine data and operator-entered production plans.
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Role-based dashboards
Shift operators, supervisors, and plant heads each see the view relevant to their decisions.
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Automated alerts
Closed the loop, flagging deviations early enough to enable proactive maintenance and head off unnecessary reprocessing before it happened.
Outcomes
From a black box to a visible trail
Visibility into shift, day, and month-wise OEE, live
Into material movement via real-time silo delta computation
Batch windows and parameters, replacing operator assumptions
Of material flow deviation, preventing repeat processing cycles
For the first time, we have absolute clarity on what each line is doing — how much is fed, how much is produced, and where inefficiencies emerge. This has reduced reprocessing and improved accountability across shifts.
PLANT MANAGER
From 0% to 100% Visibility
A categorical change, not an incremental one
What changed here was not incremental — it was categorical. A plant that had no real-time OEE figure at all now has one, refreshed continuously, broken down by shift, day, and month. Material that used to move through the building as a black box now leaves a visible trail from silo to finished fraction.
And a plant manager who once relied on walking the floor to sense whether a line was struggling can now see it on a screen before it becomes a problem worth walking over for. That is the difference between a plant that reacts to losses after they're booked and one that catches them while they're still preventable.
Ready to see your
material flow in real time?
Delpheon Lite tracks infeed, outfeed and OEE continuously — with zero manual guesswork.