Success Story

For manufacturing companies, the world is spinning faster and faster: shorter development cycles, increasingly complex production processes and massive competitive pressure make for an extremely challenging market environment. 

With the Smart Factory Platform, the manufacturing industry is provided with a marketplace that makes it possible to buy agile individual solutions that can be implemented quickly, thus accelerating the necessary digitisation of processes and making workflows more effective and efficient. For example, a frequent problem in the production line is that errors at the workstations are often not documented or only insufficiently documented, important correlations are therefore not recognisable and resulting information is not transferred to the control loop.

The first application to be developed for this platform should therefore be able to digitally record and document errors along the production line and be made available to companies as a ready-made solution on the Azure Marketplace for easy download.

Malfunctions and failures in the production process as well as defects and deficiencies of the produced goods are often still documented manually. Predictive Quality Assurance, however, requires the digitalisation of quality monitoring. For this reason, employees on the shop floor must be able to log and record all relevant data paperlessly using mobile devices with intelligent dialogue-guided input that are suitable for the production environment. 

For the development of a suitable app, those functions had to be defined first that could be used to digitally document the faults along the production line. And for the design of the user interface, attention had to be paid to good usability in the production setting, as the best technical solution will not be accepted if it is not convincing in practical use and handling. Both aspects required special industry know-how.

This knowledge was available in the Software Development Hub, and the msg Plaut core team was able to find the best solution through close exchange with colleagues from across the msg Group and various other stakeholders. Thanks to this large pool of technical, product and industry know-how, a first version of the app was developed within just three months. 

The holistic guidance along the entire innovation process by the SW Development Team ensured that the needs of the manufacturing industry were included in the conception and that the technical implementation could be carried out precisely in accordance with the strategic requirements.

The Predictive Quality Assurance App enables discrete manufacturers to digitally record defects along the production line to gain greater visibility into the effectiveness and efficiency of the production process. This means that not only can the defects themselves be rectified more quickly, but an early warning system can also be implemented to prevent defects from occurring, thus eliminating costly idle times and defective product series from the outset. Since the app‘s user interface is adapted to the production conditions on the shop floor, it enables a smooth connection with the production line. 

Predictive Quality Assurance also allows companies to make data-driven predictions of product- and process-related quality. Only when it is clear why overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is as it is, can countermeasures be taken in the right place if necessary - or, in the case of a positive development, this knowledge can be used for a sustainable, controlled increase in OEE.