Door opener for digitalization and industry 4.0 in medium-sized companies
The production-oriented visualization approaches implemented at Meleghy International were presented to other automotive suppliers in the region in April at the Gera plant in the workshop “Smart digital visualization applications in a medium-sized production company”. The workshop was organized in cooperation with the automotive thüringen network.
Maintenance management, plant management and top management presented the sense and purpose of production-oriented visualization directly at the workplace. They dealt with the question: “How can we efficiently use the amount of data generated every minute for our processes and present it in a way that is comprehensible to employees and from which our economic benefit can be derived?
Gera, as the previous pilot plant, demonstrated the results which are already being achieved on the way to digitization and visualization in connection with Industry 4.0. However, clever minds are also in the process at all other locations of digitizing analog processes step by step with small means and thus making them networkable in order to develop a common system for the group of companies. The entry into industry 4.0 took place through the visualization solutions for process optimization of the maintenance employees in Gera.
The developed system uses real-time-based information throughout, which is visualized visually by department, so that everyone has exactly the information in front of their eyes that is relevant to their task. Whether in planning, production, maintenance or plant management, even if you are working from home, the relevant data is always in reach. Each press and joining station is equipped with displays that show volume- and quality-relevant information during throughput, depending on the task or system. This ensures that every employee has an exact view of expectations. “It makes work easier. Every employee now knows how many units he has to produce per shift and what trend he is currently following,” explains plant manager Herbert Marx. “The visualization of machine data has made us more sensitive. We react earlier and can thus prevent unnecessary breakdowns. We can better coordinate and control maintenance measures and adapt them to production processes. Put simply: we can work purposefully,” adds Maintenance Manager Herwart Geske.
We are currently already visualizing volume counters and stroke rates, projections with forecasts or visualizations of quality-sensitive areas of the various parts in real time.
The project is constantly being optimized and is dependent on the employees. Because they are the ones who can tell us what information they need to master their daily tasks.
The visitors of the workshop paid great respect to our current status and our approach to visualization and the idea of bringing human and machine closer together. We received several appreciative feedbacks in the aftermath.
