LDD’s like this Dual-line Rate Display are robustly built, and are compatible with various data centres and IT infrastructures to automate the monitoring and communication of key metrics.
Visibility and communication of real-time information is central to compliance, problem-solving, and operational excellence in today’s Lean industries, which explains why Large Digit Displays (LDD’s) are a growing addition to many heavy-equipment and facility applications. In this article, we showcase three of Access Control Sales’ success stories in industries where LDD's are making ongoing, real-life impacts.
Refrigeration:
Keeping Industrial Freezers in Check
Process control is critical in the refrigeration industry, where loss of cooling results in spoilage, compliance violations… or worse: upset stomachs.
One company producing industrial refrigeration units found ACS to be their trusted vendor for heavy-duty temperature displays. Instead of comparing numerous supplier quotes, or settling for one-size-fits-all solutions, they got: “all specs sorted out within a few emails, and everything delivered ready to use which helped [their] lead times,”. The end result spoke just as loudly: they achieved a 12% reduction in temperature non-conformances, attributed to LDD finish quality, errorless installation, and tailored communication outputs to control interfaces.
The most valuable element of ACS’s Climate LDD wasn’t cutting-edge technology, but their ability to easily deliver a broad range of high-quality variant customizations. Whether you’re monitoring temperature, humidity, or both – or your climate system calls for built-in or external-input sensors – every detail can be fit to meet specific system requirements. Need an alarm to sound if temperatures fall out of control? These LDD’s can do that too.
Component Manufacturing:
Tracking Production with Ease
For manufacturers of mechanical parts, operational excellence is achieved by using process visibility to maintain production control. Tracking throughput, identifying trends, and rapidly detecting anomalies can make or break the competitiveness of an OEM’s bottom line. Without a robust system, minor discrepancies quickly escalate into major problems – resulting in defective products, wasted material, and significant downtime. This means two things: financial loss and rework orders (i.e. a lot of headache!).
A small gear manufacturing business near ACS’ office in Mississauga, Ontario faced precisely these challenges. Furthermore, when issues did arise, just getting through the initial stages of Root Cause Assessments was time-consuming and inefficient. During containment procedures, employees had to manually perform various unit tracking and equipment inspection tasks, which made data-driven problem-solving a frustrating, expensive, and infeasible strategy.
To address this, several of ACS's Multi-Line Counter LDD's were integrated with third-party motion sensors along the factory’s conveyor transport systems. The results were both simplifying and transformative. The displays output clear and continuous unit counts across the facility for effortless visual management, while providing additional process KPI’s to serve as valuable bread crumb trails in times of issue identification. "We can now spot discrepancies in output within minutes of a process non-conformance event, without needing to assign a whole team to do the actual tracking," said a project engineer at the client company.
Once again, the key to this success wasn't the display itself, but its seamless integration with different sensors, equipment, and data centres. By making actionable insights accessible at a glance, teams became empowered to communicate and make decisions quicker, ultimately minimizing downtime. This shift from reactive management to its proactive counterpart makes all the difference, especially when it comes to finding fires and putting them out.
Facility Retrofitting:
A Continuous Improvement Journey
As industrial paradigms shift to incorporate efficiency gains of new technologies, more businesses are pursuing Continuous Improvement initiatives to update their aging facilities. Many factories in particular face challenges when retrofitting legacy infrastructure with smart systems that interconnect various real-time digital data. Factor in the costs associated with these projects, and the thought of enduring all the fuss of change management becomes even less appealing.
One such project is being undertaken by a consumer electronics manufacturer working with ACS to modernize their mid-century facility. Their scope of work includes – among Internet-of-Things analytics and an additive manufacturing subcell – several ACS Displays for improved automation of data reporting. Their LDD's are customized to handle a wide range of inputs, including analog voltage, pulse signals, and encoder quadratures, while providing serial outputs and relay signals that smoothly integrate with existing IT infrastructure.
Their goal is not just to improve visibility and interconnect data, but to do so without disrupting production. ACS’s plug-and-play displays make installation straightforward and intuitive – a rarity for custom industrial products. While the facility's transformation is ongoing, early results show promising signs as more cells get adorned with Counter, Rate, and Takt-time displays.
ACS's LDD’s are bridging the gap between legacy equipment and smart systems shaping Industry4.0 practices, showing that Continuous Improvement doesn't have to mean continuous complexity.
Conclusion:
The LDD Effect
As these success stories suggest, ACS’ Large Digit Displays are an increasingly valuable “secret weapon” for improving process efficacy, problem-solving, and operational excellence across diverse industries.
Whether you’re striving for optimal climate control, efficient production throughput, or modernized facility infrastructure – among hundreds of other industrial and commercial challenges – our custom Displays are the difference between walking in the darkness and seeing the light of contemporary operations.
Are you ready to learn how LDD's can solve your company’s process visibility challenges?