Once you’ve transitioned from air tools to electric, smart tools, integrated vision technologies like Industrial Location and automation into your assembly, and utilized software solutions to analyze and collect data, the last thing you need to benefit from the Smart Factory is to connect all these solutions in a flexible ecosystem. This ecosystem will enable you and your operators to keep up with constantly changing production needs.
Modern technology has made it even easier for customers to buy and customize purchases online. This is great for growth and expanding business, but a nightmare to keep up with the unique personalization of orders. That’s where the Smart Factory will succeed. Read on to discover more about the Smart Factory and what it can do for you.
The flexible Smart Factory
The ideal factory in Industry 4.0 can deal with hyper flexibility and smoothly take on new variants or quick changes. Now that customers can start personalizing their purchases, we are beginning to see more variations in manufacturing, which can cause more errors.
To combat this, future manufacturing facilities need real-time planning and constant optimization. As changes need to be made, our solutions must be smart enough to know where the products and tools should be at any given time. Typically, tools moving around the assembly could lead to errors, but manufacturers will begin to orchestrate a flexible production free of mishaps thanks to smart solutions.
Cyber security
With all these smart solutions by your side, connecting and controlling all of your joining-related information is possible. However, this increased data flow and connected systems mean increasing your cyber security to secure your production is more important than ever.
To support the challenges of the flexible factory, Atlas Copco has ensured that all of our innovative software solutions integrate well with each other, including external systems as well. With this software suite, you can benefit from an easy-to-use, all-in-one-place interface that will enable you to make the right production decisions based on insights and recommendations.
Maintain your assets
You will also need help handling assets to further support your flexible factory, including the state and location of your tools. Alture: Maintain can help with that. With this platform, you can match operation capabilities to tool capabilities, ensure that you have enough tools for the coming production, get easy access to detailed and live asset information, see where each tool is located and the state it’s in, and connect it to our smart portal for even more features.
Alture: Maintain allows easy access to service and preventative maintenance information from anywhere in the plant using a smartphone, ensuring that those who need it can always access it. You’ll also have a 3-month overview of when your tools require maintenance and calibration. With this information, you’ll never have to deal with unplanned downtime related to tool repairs or replacement, you’ll always be in the know.
Optimize your production
When your tightening operations fail, data collected from the tool or station will be the key to fixing the quality issue so that it doesn’t happen again. If you’re only capturing the NOK statuses, you will only see a small picture of what’s happening. With all the data from recent tightenings being compared, you will have a better visualization of why the tightening failed and how to fix it.
With Atlas Copco’s analytics offering, your tightening experts will have the tools they need to find the root causes of any problems. That’s right! With Alture: Optimize, your operators will have automated insights, recommendations, and instant feedback from their smartphones when quality is at risk and production throughput concerns are emerging.
Service solutions tailored to your needs
With our service offerings, your production is monitored, and on-the-fly help will be provided to suggest and help implement the necessary solutions for you. From preventive maintenance services for assembly tools to Service Level Agreements for software maintenance and even calibration services or anything in between, Atlas Copco experts are there to help.
Tool quality
To help care for your tools, we also have QA Supervisor, which manages and collects data from all quality inspections, residual torque checks, tool checks, and non-torque-related quality checks like visual and dimension inspections. In this way, QA Supervisor keeps track of every change in the line setup making any audit quick and effective. This enables any user to keep full control of the quality processes.