Assembly line

A digital andon system shows for every cycle whether it is on schedule and where support is needed. At PistenBully, six andon boards on the chassis line visualise cycles 1 to 6. Green means on schedule, yellow calls a floater, blue calls logistics and red stands for a supervisor alarm or line stop. A moving bar with a countdown shows target and remaining time. The data comes from the Siemens PLC via OPC UA.

It puts the team's key figures on a touch display at the assembly line as a dashboard and aggregates them for the whole plant. At Bad Oldesloe, Hako builds around 20,000 machines a year on two pre-assembly and twelve final assembly lines, mostly in batch size one. Work plans, drawings, parts lists and support notes no longer exist only on paper. The recorded data appears quickly in the ERP system, and trained employees develop the dashboards further themselves.

The simplest way is via the signals of the end-of-line tester, because test runs and test results provide all the basic data. RAFI Hungaria connected the outputs of its testers to one KIS.LIGHT signal lamp each. If no new test result arrives for one minute, the lamp switches to red. From this, KIS.MANAGER calculates availability, performance and first pass yield, the share of tests passed at the first attempt. Setting it up took less than a day.

The asset administration shell connects machines through a standardised data interface, which makes lines easier to reconfigure. Until now, replacing a machine has often meant months of integration work because line PLCs are rigidly programmed. In the Bosch Rexroth model factory in Ulm, the Asset Orchestration Platform models the line using business logic, and XITASO integrates brownfield machines via a function block. The recommendation is to start with the suspected bottleneck machine.