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The automotive industry faces huge challenges in the production context. The high complexity and the high level of automation need to be handled without suffering from unplanned downtimes such as short stops, technical disturbances or machine breakdowns as well as subsequent troubleshooting.
Operational excellence is required at every factory to remain competitive which means, knowledge about machine behaviour and technology needs to be available and provided to every operator in every plant around the clock whenever needed.
Lastly, the current technology change leads to higher requirements in cost efficiency, flexibility and productivity.
We developed Shannon® and Darwin to solve those challenges in the Automotive context:
Shannon®, the operational shopfloor assistance, provides situational problem-solving suggestions for the employees at an automated production line. The tool thus forms a continuously operating optimization control loop based on high-frequency PLC data. Shannon® provides situational contextual and expert knowledge about problems and their solutions mobile in the app at any time for the entire staff on the shopfloor. This significantly reduces downtime (mean-time-to-repair) and the spread of productivity between different shifts.
Automated assembly line for mechatronic components including 14 stations and 15 PLCs. Already high production rate of 92 % and cycle time of 8s. Operational shopfloor assistance Shannon® for continuous productivity optimization.
for high frequency data collection of all legacy machine controllers
operational shopfloor assistance
"The cycle time analysis of Shannon® visualized and compared the cycle and process times for the relevant intervals at detailed station level. This enabled us to initiate concrete optimizations for individual stations to reduce the overall cycle time."
Andreas Koellner
PLC Technician, Production Process Engineering, ebm-papst St. Georgen GmbH & Co. KG
Fully automated production line for car cabin air filters consisting of 21 processes with initial efficiency rate of 79 % – 92 % depending on individual product type and shift.
Detection and quantification of optimization potential regarding short stops, breakdowns and related scrap. Based on that generation of situational counter-actions to reduce troubleshooting efforts.
for high frequency data collection of all legacy machine controllers
operational shopfloor assistance
"After a short training phase of Shannon® it was applied to one of our fully automated productions lines. The real-time transparency on error behaviour, associated scrap per cause and situational problem-solving proposals during operations helps us a lot to limit losses to a minimum around the clock!"
Ed Borger
Vice President Global Operations, Freudenberg Filtration Technologies SE & Co. KG
Darwin, the Machine Performance Finder, offers several intelligent functions to identify concrete optimization potentials of an automated production line during operation. In this way, it significantly increases the performance level of the machines.
Darwin Machine Benchmark continuously generates technical recommendations for reducing the cycle time. This also provides maintenance with an early warning system at the function or component level to prevent unplanned machine failures and to always operate each machine at its optimum.
Darwin Bottleneck Detector continuously detects the bottleneck in a linked production line at station level during operation and thus provides relevant information for effective optimization at the bottleneck.
Darwin focuses on cyclic automotive production processes, e.g. injection moulding, deep drawing, extrusion or metal stamping.
