Digitalization of Production in Presses

What makes digitalization of production facilities with presses special?

The cycle-time of series production in presses is typically constant. A common understanding for all series production is, that unplanned interruptions of the productive time of the machine are not accepted and needed interventions by humans should be restricted to a minimum. This valid for all processes independent of the realized cycle time. For cost reasons, material stocks in between machines are typical reduced to a minimum. Specialized machines with extraordinary high pout output are often hard connected with other processes. For this reason, unplanned down time is not tolerated.

What Chances offers digitalization in production or presses?

Series production with the high repetition rate and extraordinary mass of similar parts offers high potential to learn by collecting information with every produced part. Typically, strongly specialized companies produce parts on equal or similar machines in high quantity. The fundamental chances of an effective digitalization are:

• Identification and standardization of best practice approaches for setup
• Guide employees with effective visualizations.
• Reduce downtimes by load reduction.
• Make downtimes more predictable by better knowledge.
• Derive, plan, deploy and test enhancements of process and systems design.
• ...

Some basic examples can be found in these articles.

What are the specific challenges of digitalization in presses?

The typical challenge for all digitalization tasks in technical surroundings is, that the scope of the approach is often restricted by the narrow focus of respective expertise. Some classical examples are summarized here:

Data from maintenance shall be used to make maintenance planning better.

• Problem is that the planning follows previous patterns of actions. Thus, one cannot expect, that something really new and better will spontaneously arise.

Monitoring- or surveillance systems shall reduce downtime by application of boundary curves.

• Locally acquired measurement data is compared stroke-wise. In case of conspicuity a unplanned machine-stop is activated. Background data and deeper analysis for technical understanding of root causes is normally not done.

Data from numerical controls (PLCs) shall be used for making conclusion of the process. Practically two typical obstacles occur:

•  On the one hand, are these data collected and conditioned for the usage in PLC in many cases this means that important features of the signals are lost or changed.
• On the other Hand, acquiring of this data means access to security relevant components and bottleneck personal, which is typically no analytics expert but logic and control oriented.

Machine vendors bring isolated applications.

• The caption makes the point: individual solutions of single or key suppliers do typically not satisfy the broad requirements in series production.

Data silos are opened.

• From the silo into the swamp… An effective and efficient approach is needed to bring the right data to the right people.

So, what principle do we follow, when we discuss digitalization tasks in series production with our customers and partners?

The 5 R of logistics are valid for data from Digitalization in production-presses, too.

Good old fundamental understandings of specialized application domain are often transferable. We see in our daily business, that the 5 R of logistics with their equivalent 5r-rule in medicine is as true in digitalization. Unfortunately, this very basic rule is often broken. Therefore, we want to summarize the core information with some examples for the meaning in the context of digitalization here.

Contact us concerning the digitalization of production.

We build systems for data acquisition and processing on the shopfloor every day. Thus, we developed a pragmatic approach for digitalization on the shopfloor. We help to make feasible plans that describe the 5r of data logistics in your digitalization task. We describe the tricky points quality and quantity and help to build an IoT concept, that fits into your environment.

Based on our long experience in different digitalization projects, we as mechanical engineers speak the language of your engineers, workers and IT-department. This allows us to bridge existing or upcoming gaps and realize digitalization in your production efficiently.

We help making the right steps. Your first step could be, to make schedule a call here. We bring along the needed experience to make things easy.