RAM Elettronica is specialized in monitoring pasta production plants all around the world, thanks to its department of remote assistance. RAM is mainly present in Italy collaborating with many great companies involved in the milling industry and pasta production. RAM has developed a new technology for product quality check, which consists of a patented image recognition system by means of artificial vision devices embedded with IoT connectivity to ensure the required quality of the entire pasta production process.

The image recognition device, which formerly was a stand-alone off-net system, has been provided with connectivity features since November 2019, turning it into an IoT solution. The Cloud integration allows to generate new added value for the users. The implementation of a custom software connector (MindConnect Lib) allows to store local data from the automation on MindSphere, transform them into timeseries and grant accessibility to those data to authorized users through a web browser. Initially, the data were available only locally within the factory through a physical connection to the control unit. Data were not subjected to aggregation and statistical analysis and could not be presented in a readable fashion. After the integration of a MindSphere IoT Value Plan and its applications, not only the data are remotely available, but it is now possible to elaborate them and perform analytical operations seamlessly. In fact, applications like Performance Insight have been purchased to compute KPIs and create dashboards to make data readable and useful. From these applications it is possible for RAM’s customers to gain valuable insights regarding the phases involved in the pasta production and information about the quality of these processes.