How Sunrise Glass Industries found the production losses nobody could see

Every glass plant loses production it never records. A forming machine stops for a few minutes, someone restarts it, and the shift moves on. Nobody writes it down, so nobody ever counts it. At Sunrise Glass Industries, those small, invisible stoppages added up to a problem the plant could feel but could not measure.

Running a plant on logbooks

Sunrise Glass runs multiple bottle production lines, from the hot end through to the cold end. Before Tork, the plant relied on manual supervision and logbook entries to monitor all of it. Problems were discovered late, or not at all.

Machine stoppages went unnoticed for long stretches. Breakdowns were only reported when someone logged them by hand, so maintenance often heard about a fault well after it started. Losses that happened between shifts were especially hard to pin down, because no one owned the gap.

Management, meanwhile, worked from reports that arrived late and came in pieces. There was no single place to see how each line was performing right now. Supervisors spent their days reacting to problems rather than getting ahead of them.

The real cost was the one nobody could see. Unnoticed downtime and underused machines meant production losses that could not be tracked, quantified, or acted on. Every undetected stoppage was revenue quietly leaving the plant, and none of it showed up in the numbers.

What they wanted to fix

The plant's leadership started with a simple goal: see every line in real time. From there, the list grew naturally. They wanted stoppages detected the moment they happened, faster maintenance response, and clear accountability for each shift. They also wanted production data to flow into the ERP workflows they already used, and to plan production from real data instead of estimates.

What Tork put in place

Tork deployed a system built specifically for glass manufacturing, rolled out in phases so the plant could keep running throughout.

It starts on the shop floor. Industrial LoRa sensors capture production data across every line and send it through a LoRa gateway to the Tork platform. Because the network is wireless, there was no need to run new cabling through the plant.

Once the data is flowing, Tork watches for stoppages automatically and sends an alert the moment a machine stops. Plant leadership gets live dashboards that break performance down by line and by shift, and a planning module uses historical performance to make production plans more realistic.

Finally, a two-way SAP integration keeps production data in sync with the ERP, so the numbers the plant runs on and the numbers finance sees are the same numbers.

What changed

The first difference was speed. Breakdowns that used to surface hours later, if at all, are now detected in real time, and maintenance responds immediately instead of reactively. Logbooks gave way to live dashboards, and manual reporting became automatic.

The second difference was clarity. Visibility that used to be scattered across notebooks and spreadsheets is now in one place. Shift losses that once went unnoticed are tracked shift by shift, and decisions that relied on gut feel are now backed by data.

Tork helped us identify production losses we never saw before and significantly improved our response time to breakdowns.

Production Team, Sunrise Glass Industries

The change reached everyone in the plant. The plant head now sees production across every line as it happens. The maintenance team gets breakdown alerts instantly and responds to faults far faster. Supervisors can track each shift's performance with real accountability, and management finally has accurate, reliable data for planning and reporting.

From reacting to anticipating

Sunrise Glass is now a fully instrumented, data-driven plant. The bigger shift is in how people work: instead of discovering problems after the fact, the team sees them as they happen and can act before small stoppages become lost shifts.

That visibility is also where the return comes from. Plants like Sunrise Glass typically recover their investment by cutting hidden downtime and getting more out of the machines they already have, and that value starts building from the first day of deployment.

Curious how much hidden downtime is costing your lines? Run the numbers with our ROI calculator, or book a demo and we will walk you through it.