See how a vaccine manufacturer gained visibility in the toughest environments

Choong Ang Vaccine Laboratories (CAVAC) is South Korea’s largest producer of animal vaccines. Founded in 1968, it has steadily grown, manufacturing vaccines for chickens, cattle, dogs, cats, rabbits, and fish, adding research and disease testing services, and expanding globally to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, China, India, and Brazil.

CAVAC was one of Glassdome’s first customers. They wanted to expand our Production Monitoring solution to help redeploy headcount, see more raw material and environmental metrics, and further increase visibility across the manufacturing process.

They needed to:

1. Automate simple maintenance and measurement tasks

2. Measure temperature, humidity, fine dust, and harmful gasses even in hot, humid, dusty environments that would be harmful to humans and most types of sensors.

3. Measure pharmaceutical inputs and products that must be kept pure and isolated from human contact

At the same time, they also asked us to find a way to reduce power costs and long-distance communication wiring.

We translated CAVAC’s goals into four outputs:

1. Rugged, miniaturized sensor interface modules

2. Customized manufacturing status dashboards

3. Manufacturing process data visualization (a SCADA-lite solution)

4. Real-time alerts for abnormal data readings

We used secondary inputs like vibrations, sound waves, and surface temperature to calculate metrics we couldn’t measure, like vaccine ingredients that cannot be exposed to direct sensors.

In the first year, we designed a new sensor interface module, gateway circuit, and system architecture. After creating and working through a testing and verification environment, we installed sensors in boilers, refrigerators, water treatment facilities, and other systems.

In year two, we created the sensor module, equipping it with battery-based far field comms and a solar panel connector so it can work for months without maintenance or battery replacement.

Finally, we began collecting and analyzing the data in our cloud-based solution, presenting the CAVAC team with the dashboards and process visualization they needed.

All told, we implemented:

Water level sensors

Building exterior fine dust sensors

Electricity meters measuring wattage on their freeze dryer and refrigerator systems

Chemical and medicine tank level sensors

Supply pressure sensor on their air compressor

Gas volume sensor on their gas boiler

Those sensors support multiple interfaces like I2C, RS485, 4~20mA, and wireless comms.

Our sensors successfully saved CAVAC hundreds of man-hours spent on maintenance and management while working seamlessly across their entire facility. CAVAC was able to achieve an unprecedented level of visibility across their manufacturing environment.

Our new gateway design achieved KC / FCC / IC certifications for industrial environments, and acquired KOLAS onsite test conformity for performance indicators. Working in partnership, we took CAVAC to the next level of precision, ruggedness, and visibility.