How Advantech’s Solutions for Yeefung’s Automated Guided Vehicles Help Turn Traditional Factories into Smart Factories

In order to meet customer expectations by supplying a wide variety of packaging units, from 36 to 1000 spoons per package, a new production and packaging line needed to be built. DeSter wanted to achieve higher production capacity, lower cycle time and a high degree of operator friendliness with this new production line.

Injection Technology (Itech) is a custom molder for a variety of clients that require precision plastic parts for such products as electric meter covers, dental appliance cases and spools. With 95 employees operating 23 molding machines in a 30,000 square foot plant, Itech wanted to reduce man hours and increase efficiency.

Tofflon has developed a fully automatic machine that uses light to inspect vials, medicine bottles, or infusion containers for glass fragments, aluminum particles, rubber grains, hairs, fibers, or other contaminants. It also detects damaged containers with cracks or inclusions (microscopic imperfections), automatically removing faulty or contaminated products. In order to cover all production processes for freeze-dried pharmaceuticals, Tofflon needed to create an open, consistent, and module-based automation concept.

Most of the customer's warehouses run on utility and generator power. Since these warehouses are in remote locations, power outages are a very common scenario. Diesel fuel, thereby, becomes a significant cost for these warehouses. Energy consumption was also very high due to the lack of a consistent temperature throughout the facility. This lack of a consistent temperature in all areas and no way to control it, resulted in the customer losing a significant amount of their temperature sensitive goods due to spoilage.

The manufacture and assembly of massive fuselage assemblies and other large structures generates a river of data. In fact, the bill of materials for a single fuselage alone can be millions of rows of data. In-house production processes and testing, as well as other manufacturers and customers created data flows that overwhelmed previous processes and information systems. Spirit’s customer base had grown substantially since their 2005 divestiture from Boeing, resulting in a $41 billion backlog of orders to fill. To address this backlog, meet increased customer demands and minimize additional capital investment, the company needed a way to improve throughput in the existing operational footprint. Spirit had a requirement from customers to increase fuselage production by 30%. To accomplish this goal, Spirit needed real-time information on its value chain and workflow. However, the two terabytes of data being pulled from their SAP ECC was unmanageable and overloaded their business warehouse. It had become time-consuming and difficult to pull aggregate data, disaggregate it for the needed information and then reassemble to create a report. During the 6-8 hours it took to build a report, another work shift (they run three per day) would have already taken place, thus the report content was out-of-date before it was ever delivered. As a result, supervisors often had to rely on manual efforts to provide charts, reports and analysis.

At times, ULA has as many as 15 different operating systems dedicated to overlapping processes, such as rocket design, testing, and launch. Multiple systems created unnecessary costs and unwanted confusion among workers at offices, factories, and launch sites in different location. In order to improve collaboration and transparency during vital activities that directly influence mission success, ULA wanted to improve data sharing and streamline manufacturing processes.