Negri Bossi received an order from Soag Europe (Sigit Oman Automotive Group) for 24 machines to be installed during 2017 and 2018. Soag is amongst Negri Bossi’s most prominent and long-established customers, having installed over 150 Negri Bossi machines in the last ten years. The machines range in size from 50 to 2,000 tonnes.

Soag is a multinational automotive and appliance components manufacturer with over 1500 employees. Formerly Sigit, the company started operating in Italy in 1966, establishing themselves in the automotive industry as a Tier 1 supplier to Fiat group. The company started a growth strategy in 2000, when new plants were opened in Italy, Spain, Serbia, Morocco, Russia and in Poland strengthening their relationship with Volkswagen, Renault and Peugeot. In 2017 a new business unit, Soag Appliance was formed, acquiring Tecnoplast group, who have strong relationships with Whirpool, Electrolux and Philips.

All the machines installed in Sigit are equipped to the same specification enabling total inter-operability between plants. Strong economies of scale ensure reduced management and maintenance costs, whilst standardisation of processes and technologies assure better repeatability and product consistency across the various plants.

Soag is the first customer of Negri Bossi to have already adapted its production organisation to the concept of Industry 4.0. All 150 presses in 8 factories are connected to a dedicated Wi-Fi network and transmit real-time production, machine shutdown and quality data to their ERP (SAP) system. There is therefore a centralised and always up to date view of the manufacturing performance of the factories.

The new machines ordered will allow the company to further experiment with new technologies keeping Industry 4.0 in mind. Experimenting with predictive maintenance solutions, synchronised planning and orchestrated production with other business processes is a key focus. To achieve these goals, Soag and Negri Bossi signed a collaboration agreement for the joint development of the Open Plast project www.openplast.it, the first open and scalable open source platform for Industry 4.0 in the plastics world.