Improving the processes of a spanish car factoy
OpenGate enables the location and traceability of vehicles with failures and damages in the manufacturing process
Accurate real-time vehicle tracking
Traceability of vehicles from the identification of the fault to its correct repair and market launch
Complete history of failures that allows to detect which are the most frequent and analyze what can cause it
Improved management of the team and resources involved in the process
Use case description:
In industrial production, one of the great challenges is the optimization of processes and inventory management. So an efficient industrial process, it is essential that the manufacturing of the products be carried out in the shortest possible time, with an excellent quality assurance and making the resulting product reach the final customer or the supplier as soon as possible.
This is the objective of our client, one of the largest car manufacturers in Spain.
When in the final step of quality certification process, our client detected that any of the cars presented a problem or damage, that car was withdrawn to a specific area for repair and subsequent release to the market.
The problem they encountered was the location of that vehicles, not only in the storage area but in the different workshops that the company has, because there are many operators responsible for leaving and collecting cars and it was very difficult to maintain a common repository of information that meets these requirements.
In order to enable the location and traceability of repairs carried out on vehicles, this step of the quality certification process has been modified, integrating OpenGate as a tool to facilitate the process of locating and managing vehicle repairs. When the operator detects a problem in a car, that vehicle is registered in the platform with its identification data as well as with the problems detected. A specific device is assigned to the car and put inside, and remains associated through the entire process. The device uses an easily replaceable battery with great autonomy, with Sigfox as communication technology and sends the precise location of the car to OpenGate IoT Platform. As consecuence, this car is perfectly located both in the storage area and in the different workshops through which it is going due to its repair process as well as by the operators that perform that repair. In addition, OpenGate measures the time elapsed from the detection of the failure until it is fixed. At the final step, when the vehicle is in perfect condition for its release, the device is disassociate from the car and ready to be linked with another vehicle.
As a result of the modifications applied to the quality certification processes for vehicles, the entire process to bring these vehicles to the market has been optimized by almost 20%. In one hand, OpenGate IoT Platform is registering a detailed analysis of manufacturing failures, which have a greater presence in these vehicles and, above all, their repair time. By the other and, our customer is also able to obtain information about the work done by the operators such as: the number and type of repairs that each of them performs and the time they use.
