A mechanical engineering company plans to digitize its production processes. For each individual part produced, it shall be possible to trace from which batch of raw material it was made, which machines were used and at which settings. Some or all parts are also checked individually for certain properties in order to optimize machine settings and reduce scrap. It shall be possible to provide all this data to customers, either as a printed certificate or digitally.
Requirements: Automation and traceability
The processing of parts must be completely traceable, and at the same time, efficiency in the factory is a top priority. This can only be achieved if all the data that is generated is integrated into the data management system automatically, without imposing additional tasks on the employees. The settings and sensor data of the machines must be linked to the processing steps of individual workpieces, and this data must be easily retrievable for each workpiece. Meaningful summaries of the data must also be easily available, for example in order to correlate scrap rates with machine settings.
Implementation with LinkAhead
Using customized background services, the data from all machines in production and quality control is automatically combined and interlinked with each other and with the workpieces in LinkAhead. After all processing steps have been completed, LinkAhead generates a report for each workpiece from this data with the relevant settings and inspection results. Data scientists in the company can access the data with the powerful search language in LinkAhead or directly via programming interfaces (APIs) and use machine learning or other AI techniques to identify and optimize critical production parameters.