Manufacturing
Learn more about the Ubisense Process Tracker
Much
progress has been made in the last two decades to automate the manufacturing
process by introducing more and more machines to perform increasingly complex
tasks. Nevertheless few advances have been made to help the most flexible of
all manufacturing resources 'the human worker' to become more productive.
With the advent of the Ubisense system it is now possible to provide context and
location aware support to workers improving quality by reducing errors (and
therefore reducing the cost of fixing them) and increasing efficiency by
reducing process execution times. The devices and tools used by the workers can
be made to know where they are and in which relation they stand to the
production materials by attaching Ubisense tags to them so, for example, simply
approaching a car with an automatic screwdriver can result in the correct
control program for the car type being loaded into the tool without the worker
needing to perform a barcode scan or enter information into a terminal.
The
interaction between workers, machines, tools, work areas and the products they
are manufacturing has a significant location component. Often valuable
production time is lost because the pallet with the right material is not where
it should be and a search must be carried out or a worker cannot find the
particular car needing a correction to a particular problem. Dynamically being
able to improve the usage of tight factory space for a staging area based on
the current locations of the relevant production goods, materials and workers
can result in significant improvements to efficiency, reducing wait times and
production costs. Many manufacturing processes are lengthy and have hundreds of
steps which take place often in several different factory buildings. Being able
to track production items accurately across a plant and link the location to
the manufacturing stage results in fewer errors and improved work-flow.
Whether in
Automotive, Aerospace, Semi-conductor or discrete manufacturing, the Ubisense system
will deliver improved quality at a reduced cost to make your manufacturing
operation more competitive. There follow some example applications of the
system in the manufacturing area.
Automatic
vehicle recognition in automotive production
In a car production
facility, different variants of a model are often produced sequentially as they
are ordered. Each individual car moving along a production line therefore may
require a different work order at each assembly point. Traditionally, the
specific car had to be identified by the worker at the assembly point either by
entering data into a terminal or scanning a barcode. If an error occurs during
this identification process, the wrong work order will be loaded and a
manufacturing defect created which has to be detected during quality assurance
and corrected during the finishing phase at some expense. If Ubisense tags are
fixed to the vehicles and the tool used by the worker, then the Ubisense system
can detect and identify the car as the worker approaches it with the tool and
initiate the loading of the correct work order without any manual intervention
or risk of error by the worker.
Vehicle
location in automotive finishing
As cars
come off the production line they pass through a quality assurance and those
which fail enter the finishing area so that the defects which have been
detected may be fixed. In order to organise the work, it is important to know
where each defective vehicle has been parked so that workers with the
appropriate skills can be assigned the repair work. It is also important to
know if there are free pits available for repair work and how much free space
is available in buffer zones for additional vehicles. All these questions may
be simply answered if the vehicles each have a Ubisense tag inside them.
Wafer
cassette tracking in a semi-conductor fab
Custom
chips for particular customers are usually produced in relative small lots. In
order to ensure that the resources of a semi-conductor fab are well utilised,
many different orders for different customers are processed in parallel. The
chips go through as many as 500 steps in the manufacturing process and some of
the steps take place using machines located in different parts of the facility.
This all results in trolleys of wafers moving continuously through the
facility, each wafer to be processed in a particular sequence. It is easy to
lose track of a particular cassette and so the cassettes each receive a
Ubisense tag such that their location is constantly visible, out-of-sequence
operations can be avoided and search times eliminated.
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