Almost every manufacturer strives to minimise inventory, increase automation, improve operational and financial controls, and minimise environmental impact by reducing energy consumption and waste and sustainably sourcing raw materials.

CSR PGH Bricks and Pavers aims to achieve all these goals by applying IoT technology to gather and act on basic information about a very basic product: accurately measuring the colour of the bricks it produces.

This seemingly simple outcome is the result of a sophisticated IoT project that won the Industrial Automation category of the 2024 IoT Awards, announced at the IoT Impact conference in Sydney on 13 June, 2024, at UTS. 

Customers want bricks with consistent colours or, for some projects, a specific range of variations. Previously, CSR PGH Bricks and Pavers met these requirements by producing colour variations in the manufacturing process and manually sorting bricks to meet customer requirements. The system was complex, lacked measurable criteria, sometimes produced batches with inconsistent colours, and resulted in waste.

In conjunction with Bosch Australia Manufacturing Solutions the company has built a system that gathers and analyses pertinent data on brick production and colour variation. It enables similar bricks to be bundled for sale, alerts operators to colour variations in the production process enabling them to modify the process, and provides data to aid in product management.

To develop the system Bosch Australia Manufacturing Solutions collaborated with Bosch Global Software Technologies, a company specialising in Industrial AI and IoT-driven manufacturing efficiencies.

The system identifes, in real time, colour variations in bricks coming through the production process enabling remedial action to be taken to address these variations and in so doing minimises waste in the form of bricks in unwanted colours.

By enabling bricks to be produced with consistent size and colour, the system has increased customers’ confidence that the bricks they receive will meet their expectations. This in turn has led to a reduction in the number of customer complaints CSR PGH Bricks and Pavers has to deal with.

To develop a system that would be scaleable and suitable for future investment and expansion Bosch Australia Manufacturing Solutions developed built the system on open architecture principles, and ensured it was vendor and platform agnostic.

The company also developed algorithms and deployed the system on secure private cloud infrastructure, designed to process, in real time, the vast amounts of data collected, and provide actionable insights.

It is listed in the award submission as "CSR PGH Bricks and Pavers," but the name is "PGH Bricks and Pavers".

Express interest in being notified when entries open for the 2025 IoT Awards here.