Feb 26, 2020
About the Customer
Headquartered in London and based out of Minnesota in the U.S., the customer is a global provider of electrical connection and protection solutions that aim to ensure a more secure world. Their 9,000 employees design, manufacture and distribute electrical enclosures, heat tracing solutions, heat management systems and fastening solutions. The customer’s robust portfolio of leading electrical product brands dates back more than 100 years.
Engineering Industries eXcellence is working with the enclosures division of the customer’s business, responsible for the production of industrial-scale electrical protection products such as metal and non-metal panels, cases, racks, server cabinets and cooling systems. Together with technology partner OPS Solutions, Engineering Industries eXcellence's Industries eXcellence team is designing and delivering an innovative Augmented Reality (AR) solution called Light Guide Systems (LGS) in order to automate and optimize the customer's inefficient Manufacturing Quality Management processes, starting with their flagship plant in Mexico.
The Customer’s Need
Because the products of this division aim to protect electrical systems in facilities where the cost of failure is very high, ensuring the highest quality of the enclosures they manufacture is absolutely critical to the sustainability of the business. At this first plant in scope, the customer manufactures over 60 variations of industrial casing and panel products, and every panel produced must be inspected for quality before leaving the factory. Currently, all quality checks and testing procedures are executed manually by a high number of dedicated personnel on the factory floor, and each manual check takes an average of 3 minutes. This has proven to be very inefficient and costly for the customer.
On top of that, the customer has just purchased a number of new machines that will enable them to quadruple their plant’s throughput in the same amount of time. While an exciting opportunity for their business, given how long it currently takes for each panel to be inspected and approved, the customer would have to invest in many more resources to perform quality checks in order to keep up with the increase in production. To overcome these challenges, the customer has decided to look to digitalization as a means to minimize costs, ensure accuracy, optimize resources and drive efficiency in their quality testing processes. They needed experts in Digital Manufacturing, so they partnered with Engineering Industries eXcellence and OPS Solutions to help them find and implement the best solution to transform the processes on their factory floor.
About the Solution
After a thorough analysis of their main pain points and requirements, our team identified Light Guide Systems (LGS) as the right solution to help the customer achieve their production goals and see significant cost-savings in the shortest amount of time. Engineering Industries eXcellence is a certified reseller and system integrator of LGS, a powerful and flexible Augmented Reality (AR) tool designed to facilitate and optimize manual assembly and manufacturing processes. Utilizing a patented projection system and the latest technology, LGS's proprietary software application creates visual workflow via overhead projectors to guide an operator as he or she performs a task on the factory floor. For this first deployment, our LGS solution will be seamlessly installed at the customer’s quality inspection workstation. The solution delivered will:
- Project specific color-coded, animated light beams and visual prompts in the form of text, symbols, graphics, blueprints and video to guide the customer’s operators as they perform quality checks;
- Eliminate operator reliance on hardcopy work instructions, computer screens or memory;
- Guide operators through quality tasks and confirm that each check met requirements for that product;
- Automatically record inspection times, providing real-time data and analytics for management;
- Ensure error-proof quality testing for all 60 of the customer’s product variations.
Engineering’s Advantage
Our team has configured and will be implementing Light Guide Systems at the customer’s plant in the coming weeks. The solution delivered will enable the customer to eliminate errors in quality checks and reduce the time it takes for each inspection from 3 minutes per part to 30 seconds per part. That means that quality checks will be performed 6 times faster than before thanks to the capabilities of their new Augmented Reality system. This will result in significant increases in cost-savings and workforce efficiency for the customer as soon as the system goes live.
Once completed, our goal is to drive the expansion and adoption of this powerful tool across all the customer’s plants in North America, including those in the United States. With Augmented Reality (AR) increasingly being adopted as an enabling technology for Industry 4.0, our team looks forward to a successful delivery of this solution for this customer, as well as for many others in the future. Together with OPS Solutions and Light Guide Systems, Engineering Industries eXcellence will continue to showcase the real value and tangible benefits AR can bring to training, execution and maintenance operations in the industrial and manufacturing settings.
