TAV | Made With Intermac glass North America

The ambitious project by Jean-Yves Glumineau has a concrete presence, right opposite the current TIV (Tout l'Intérêt du Vitrage Isolant) facility based in the Treize-Septiers commune (in the French town of Nantes): a brand new "TAV" (Tout l'Art du Verre) flat glass processing plant. This innovative project is characterised by maximum process automation, with a view to creating a Smart Factory in the truest sense. The new plant is equipped with highly specialised technologies for cutting, grinding/polishing, ceramic printing, enamelling and tempering of glass: new machining operations that have expanded the product range already offered by parent company TIV . These new processes are mainly aimed at interior designers, furniture makers, metalworkers and builders working on large façades and glass door and frames.

To assist with the launch of this project, Jean-Yves Glumineau enlisted the help of Jean-Louis Piscina, a glass industry professional with 25 years of experience in the mirror sector, who is particularly skilled in machining and handling glass. In addition to a trusted business associate, he also needed a technological partner with impeccable credentials in order to complete the challenge. Advanced machining technologies, connectivity, tools for simulating products and processes and preventive traceability: these are the key issues being tackled by Intermac and TAV as they embark upon an ambitious path towards automation, combining resources and innovative expertise. The new facility occupies an area of 5,300 m2, to which is added to the 7,500 m2 occupied by the TIV plant (set to be extended to 15,000 m2 in 2018). Indeed, when considering the new facility, Jean-Louis Piscina and Jean-Yves Glumineau decided that they wanted to give life and shape to a new industrial concept for the mirror factory, in the footsteps of the same philosophy that guided TIV in 2008: "Everything in line, with no need to touch the glass, reducing human intervention."

Industry 4.0

The challenge of the TAV project - the fruit of a 5 million euro investment - was to combine a vast range of skills, and to introduce high levels of automation through the integration of robotics solutions. The performance of the machines incorporated into the automation process is optimised, in a constant and continuous manner. The solutions developed by Intermac provide customers with absolute certainty, enabling them to know exactly what is being produced, along with the levels of efficiency being achieved. Automation reduces manual intervention and the risk of error to zero, so much so that the production output is nigh-on perfect. And that's not all: with these systems, customers now know how long it will take to process an order and optimise this as far as possible, in order to meet the demands of the market in the shortest achievable time-frame. In particular, to respond to the need for maximum flexibility, a Batch-One process has been developed to optimise production and to customise even large production batches. This enables TAV to adapt production quickly, in order to meet trends in demand and to satisfy the needs of the market. "We wanted all the machines to be able to communicate with each other, and to work in a coordinated manner without operator intervention. We achieved this, with flying colours", confirms Jean-Louis again.

«With this new venture, our goal was to ensure that everything was perfectly in line, and to avoid any need to actually handle the glass. We needed new, technologically-advanced equipment in order to eliminate the time wasted on transferring of glass sheets from one machine to another, minimising manual handling of the glass and preventing operators from having to spend most of their time pushing carriages around rather than using it in a more efficient, productive manner - working on the machines».

Jean-Yves Glumineau Owner

Country

TAV (Tout l'Art du Verre) and Intermac come together to create a tangible example of smart manufacturing.

One of the most interesting collaborations in the context of Industry 4.0. flies the French flag, illustrating how excellence in industrial automation and robotics can be integrated with the most advanced production processes.