More than 6,000 employees – the largest employer in the Vysočina region.
Task
To create a support system for quality control and provide support for production processes.
The plant in Jihlava produces cases for pumps of the Common Rail system on continuous-flow lines. Dozens of fully automated special CNC machines are deployed on the lines at any time to machine the cases in the course of sequential operations.
Because customers purchasing pump cases require the guaranteed highest quality products, PC stations collecting data about the progress of the pump case machining were installed in individual lines (unless the producer had already equipped the machines with similar technology). The period of the operational data collection depends on the capabilities of each machine. For some machines, data are on-line immediately after an operation has been completed, while other machines can collect data only in batches.
In order to introduce a clear and transparent evaluation of all available parameters of the produced pump cases, a system had to be developed that could continuously retrieve available information in a mutually compatible format and store the information in a database for further evaluation.
The main objectives of the project can be summarized as follows:
- to ensure 100% monitoring of production operations and their results (production workflow)
- to support the quality control process
- to support the EURO repair process
- to create a support system for quality control
The criteria to be met were:
- sharing information
- monitoring the progress of manufacturing operations
- detecting blocked cases, for example due to the need to control specifications
- supporting decision making at repair, final inspection, and quality inspector’s workplaces
- monitoring the rate of utilization of machines and production lines
- reporting defects and scrap rates according to various criteria
- monitoring performance at the repair workplace and repair prices
- analysing the causes of defects
- supporting the decision-making process
Solutions
After an exacting selection procedure, Bosch Diesel chose the solution provided by Infinity a.s. based on Oracle Business Intelligence.
The following modules were developed as part of the solution:
- “Quality Gate” supervises the faultless production workflow for each product
- “Euro Repairs” keeps active records about all repair works carried out on products that have not passed through the Quality Gate
- “Quality Inspector” supports decisions on final classification of products under the “reject” category
- “Business Intelligence” serves as a single repository data warehouse to support the reporting and implementation of detailed production analyses, including the monitoring of quantitative and qualitative indicators
The project was implemented from August 2007 to January 2008 in the following stages:
- August 2007 – November 2007
- analysis of the requirements for applications and proposed solution
- implementation, testing, knowledge transfer- education, training
- November 2007 – December 2007
- analysis of indicators for reporting and analysing
- creation of a data warehouse, deployment of Oracle BI Discoverer
- training for administrators and users, testing
- January 2008
- implementation of the system into operation
Achievements
The system designed for processing information about the parameters of produced pump cases comprises several sub-systems:
1/ The operational sub-system, regularly receiving all data on parameters of the pump cases being produced at the moment. Operational datasets were created in the hierarchy above this sub-system for the purpose of instant search and display of the requested information.
2/ The archive database to which any information on the pump cases that have been dispatched are transferred. It contains permanent information about all manufactured pump cases.
3/ The data warehouse sub-system is gradually filled with information from the operational sub-system and comprises two levels. The first level contains information about all manufactured pump cases, covering the manufacturing process up to the operational level and the period of approximately six months. The second level is aggregated and provides quantitative data on the number of items and operations in accordance with all relevant criteria. These quantitative data are saved, enabling monitoring of all important parameters in the long term.
The data warehouse serves as a resource for reporting and analyses. The Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer component is deployed here. Oracle BI Discoverer is a tool for creating reports and charts that allow tracking of product parameters in detail, monitoring of the capacity utilization, balancing of individual machines and lines, and tracking of defective products according to various criteria, even over a longer period of time.
Business Impacts
A comprehensive tool helping the top management officers and production managers to keep track of the quality of dispatched products. It allows them to easily trace back any information about products, and to analyse causes of defects and even prevent them in some cases.
