Chindasook Group·Manufacturing
Taking paper off the factory floor at a 900-metre manufacturing site
Chindasook Group — maker of the Sanwa, Asahi, ATACO and Rambo water fittings brands — moved production reporting from paper to tablets over a Cisco wired and wireless network Net Bright designed, built and still supports.
The challenge
Chindasook Group has been in business since 1950, starting in water pipes and fittings and going on to manufacture Asahi water meters in Thailand under licence. Sanwa, ATACO, Rambo and the Drago smart metering line followed, along with the largest brass processing plant in ASEAN.
On the production floor, though, results were still written down on paper and typed into the system afterwards. That cost time twice over and introduced errors at both the writing and the keying stage, which meant production reporting always lagged behind production.
Covering the site with wireless was not straightforward either: ten factory buildings spread over 900 metres, in an environment with high ambient temperatures and real risk to electronic equipment.
What we built
Net Bright covers the whole network estate: Cisco Catalyst 3750 core switching and Catalyst 2960 access switching, Cisco 5500 Series Wireless Controllers with Cisco Aironet 2800 access points placed across the offices and the plant, and the firewall protecting all of it.
The wireless design used Cisco equipment rated for industrial conditions, so the coverage holds up in the heat and dust of a working factory rather than only in the office areas.
Beyond supplying and installing, Net Bright planned the network so it could absorb the group’s growth — the systems at the Samut Prakan plant connect through to head office on Worachak Road in Bangkok.
The result
Production lines now report through a purpose-built application on tablets, from the point where the output is actually produced. Reporting moved from a paper-then-typing cycle to every two hours.
The IT team’s own framing is worth keeping: the group is not a technology company, so the test for any system is whether it serves the business strategy — not whether it is the newest thing available.
We looked at pre-sales and post-sales service, the advice given, and whether the investment made sense. On those grounds we trust Net Bright to look after almost all of our network equipment, and to advise us on developing the network along the lines it should follow.
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