Enhancing Remote Work Connectivity and Efficiency at BoulderThinking with Fireflies

The customer needed to monitor non-contact alignment and non-contact process temperature in different positions along a 100-meter production line. Space around the line is tight and operators and forklift trucks are passing by constantly. Installation of correctly routed cables from sensors back to the control station would have been expensive and would have taken too long and caused too much disruption to ongoing operations.

Designed to alert drivers when schoolchildren are present, especially in low-visibility conditions, school-zone flasher signals are typically updated manually at each school. The switching is based on the school calendar and manually changed when an unexpected early dismissal occurs, as in the case of a weather-event altering the normal schedule. The process to reprogram the flashers requires a significant effort by school district personnel to implement due to the large number of warning flashers installed across an entire school district.

Shimane Fujitsu, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fujitsu and a leading manufacturer of business notebooks and tablets, set out to improve processes where factory inspections found product errors. Prioritizing product rework based on shipping date was challenging, and it caused Shimane Fujitsu to incur additional shipping fees. The company needed a way to collect data to better track the location of products in the rework cycle as well as monitor progress in real time. The collected data would also help process analysis for future improvements. 

With greater market demand for food safety, traceability is receiving increasingly more attention in the food and beverage industry as well as the packaging industry. One of the world's leading providers of beverage containers required a system to identify bar codes and alphanumeric characters on ink-jet-printed labels at a run rate of 7 units and minimum 99.9% accuracy. Since there were few engineers in the factory, the customer sought to implement a reliable system with an easy-to-use GUI for workers with a less technical background.

Earth moving machines require an immense energy source to provide the power they need for use within civil engineering works. ‘Hydraulic Motors’ allow this power to be applied to enable the machines movement and in addition ‘Control Valves’ also provide the operator with the precise feel and control required to undertake the necessary tasks needed for such machines, including trenching, rock breaking and demolition. These same motors are also used in cranes, wheel loaders and general construction equipment. Though not a new product, the designs of such motors and control valves have been around a few decades, the overall method for manufacture has changed rapidly over the last few years to take account of the need for more modular designs, manufacture and just-in-time manufacturing. Kawasaki Precision Machinery (UK) Ltd based in Plymouth, UK is one of the leading manufacturers of such motors and pumps. They approached Industrial Vision Systems Ltd to come up with a solution to provide automated inspection of such pumps for their semi-automated assembly process. The pumps requiring inspection are at a sub-assembly stage when they are due for the inspection process to take place. Due to the highly modular nature of the construction each part of the pump can have many different derivatives which overall have a different effect on the pump in industrial use. It is therefore critical for the manufacturing process to check all components are the correct type and number for the construction of the pump to begin. Once built it is difficult and costly to rework such units if a fault is detected later in the manufacturing process, therefore automated visual inspection is critical for the success in building quality motors and pumps.

Jade Ocean is a resort-style high-rise rental property in southern Florida - a 50-story glass tower overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The property’s management wanted an app that would function as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for the property and a seamless communication tool for residents and staff.