In 1998, a not-so-obscure metal band from 's-Hertogenbosch released an album titled "How to measure a planet." The band was called The Gathering, and this album was a break from their previous albums, which were filled with rather bombastic heavy metal. Bold, but they did it - and they were successful. With a startup, it's no different. At some point you have to deviate from your original plan to become successful. I remember the story of an ex-colleague at Philips who started his own company in compiler optimization. He ended up doing very different things, in the field of static code analysis. The core technology he used remained the same, but he ended up in a totally different market.
Within BDF, Quinso will work intensively with parties engaged in developing cutting-edge technologies and solutions. The goal is to contribute to their digital transformation, one of the biggest themes in business today.
You don't make a switch like that overnight. It takes a little, or a lot, of trial and error to get to that point. That's what we are dealing with at Shinchoku right now, shortly after we started and even before the first version of our website is live.
My original idea is still alive and well: help small and medium-sized manufacturers optimize their production processes in a data-driven way. Or in other words, make them part of Smart Industry, Digital Factory. However, we now know that for this market, the world looks a little different than all the fancy Digital Factory videos show. There are very few robots, there is still a lot of manual labor, and although we live in the age of digitization, many factories still have very little production management software running.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does require us to determine what steps we want to take to achieve our original goal. We're not going to install an Internet gateway by default, connect it to the PLCs of all production machines and then send the data obtained to a dashboard. That was a bit of a shorthand version of our story anyway - you can't just collect random data and be successful, so we had to analyze with the customer what data we needed to collect before we started.
That analysis has now given us both feet on the ground: in most of the factories we have seen so far, there is very little data to collect initially. We need to work with the customer, with the operators in the plant, to identify which parts of the process are candidates for improvement. This has to be done based on anecdotal information and experience, because there is limited automation and reporting support. Once identified, we must determine what can be done to collect and organize data (semi-)automatically before we can start working on our actual goal.
"In one factory, for example, about 60-70% of the production process was found to be based on manual labor."
In one factory, for example, about 60-70 percent of the production process was found to be based on manual labor. Not only are the machines operated by people, but the metal parts produced by those machines are also polished by hand. The problem in this factory is that at any point during production, no one has a record of how many parts are being processed for a given order and where they are located.
In a place like this, going from manual labor to full automation in one fell swoop is nothing more than a dream. The reality is that we need to take small steps. In this case, the first step could very well be the installation of wireless foot pedals on certain workstations that operators can easily press each time they are finished with a particular part. Combined with tracking the trays in which the metal parts are transported through the factory (using RFID or something similar), that would help us get a better picture of how many parts are being produced and what stage of production they are at. Of course, this is light years away from installing a few network cables and a gateway and collecting data that is already there.
We have discussed our experiences with both customers and automation specialists on our side of the industry. They all confirm that some important steps must first be taken if Digital Factory is to come within reach of smaller manufacturing companies. Not everyone is as big as L'Oreal or Volkswagen, where millions a year can be spent on improving automation and human labor in production has long since been largely eliminated.
In keeping with the song from The Gathering, we need to figure out how to measure a planet before we can actually measure it. That is what we are working on now. Realizing our Digital Factory vision requires some big steps, the first of which must be taken in our market of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies.
Almost from the beginning, then, Shinchoku will not only be a data analysis company, but will also have to do a lot of work on process analysis and automation - almost literally to be able to generate its own data.
Brainport Digital Factory works every day with 23 active members (business and technical education) to realize the Digital Factory. We have a modern open systems manufacturing platform, on which we apply new Digital Factory technology such as AR, Low code machine models, (private) 5G, precise localization and AGVs.
By combining in-depth domain knowledge from our members, arrive at highly innovative business and engineering solutions that concretize the digital factory for both SME and large-scale manufacturing companies.
By combining in-depth domain knowledge from our members, arrive at highly innovative business and engineering solutions that concretize the digital factory for both SME and large-scale manufacturing companies.
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