Feb 20, 2019
About the Customer
Headquartered in Denmark, the customer is a global manufacturer of industry-leading products and services are used in cooling food, air conditioning, heating buildings, controlling electric motors, compressors, variable frequency drives and powering mobile machinery. Our Industries eXcellence team has been working with the customer’s power solution division, which is responsible for the production of hydraulic motors and pumps for Heavy Equipment, including agricultural machinery and industrial tractors.
A Strategic Partnership for Industry 4.0
Engineering Industries eXcellence has been the customer’s strategic Digital Manufacturing partner for almost a decade. Our work together began in 2010, when our leading Manufacturing Execution System (MES) team was brought in by the customer to help them find and implement the best solution to manage their highly variable manufacturing process. In addition, they hoped to standardize this process and its management across their plants in North America, South America, Europe and Asia.
A Highly Variable Manufacturing Process
The customer’s highly variable manufacturing process presented an enormous problem for the customer and a big challenge for our consultants. The number of variants to be accounted for and managed were astronomical – the product could be manufactured in 500 different “flavors” – almost at the level of a car assembly process. Engineering’s aim was to build and deliver a digital solution first and foremost capable of managing the data and workflow of this process. In addition, our solution also aimed to provide traceability as well support to the shop floor operators who executed the complex assembly process.
Main Business Drivers
- Control data volume: having on average hundreds of recipes for each product family leads to huge, unmanageable amounts of data
- Improve data flexibility: a production environment dealing with so many variations is such because production needs are extremely flexible and can easily change in time according to customers’ demands, and a statically designed solution cannot cope with such requirements
- Ensure data maintenance: changes applied to any part need to be easily propagated
A Customized MES Solution
Our team delivered a successful project for the customer with the design and implementation of a highly customized MES solution able to cope with the complex assembly process of their hydraulic pumps, including handling manifold variety of recipes and the traceability of their units along the assembly line. Leveraging Siemens Opcenter Execution (SIMATIC IT) MES software, the solution was built with a number of innovative customizations for high automation and a set of customer-specific rules for recipe management. Our Industries eXcellence experts also completed the integration of the new MES with the control layer and provided onsite technical training and support during and after each rollout.
The Evolution of the Solution
Since the first implementation of the new MES system, our team has been leading the deployment of the solution across different global sites as well as providing full IT support and governance support for the customer. In addition, our team of customer specialists has continued to develop and augment this solution with new versions, taking into account the customer’s evolving needs, adding new capabilities and features, and applying advancements in technology to address the same needs in a better, more scalable and more flexible way. In fact, a new version based on Siemens Opcenter Execution (SIMATIC IT) Unified Architecture - with new technologies, faster capabilities and better functionalities – is set to be ready for the customer this year.
A Roadmap to Industry 4.0
Our consultants just completed another successful phase implementing an upgraded version of the MES solution in the customer’s site in Slovakia. This year, our work continues at additional customer sites in the United States, Germany and Brazil. Next year, we will be focusing on the customer’s Asian manufacturing plants. And because global standardization was a critical element for the customer when taking on this enterprise MES program, MES for hydraulic pump assembly is just the beginning our Digital Manufacturing work together.
Our team of experts is already helping the customer define their long-term Industry 4.0 roadmap and maturity model in order to ensure consistency in process, product and business management across not only all of their plants, but across all the different manufacturing divisions of their enterprise. This is a true partnership showcasing our commitment to collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement, and we look forward to working with this customer for many more years to come.
