To obtain production information, employees often have to read stationary screens or paper lists. Operators usually recognize errors and tasks by status lights. As a result, the employee only has an overview of a limited area, often does not react immediately to problems and tasks are prioritized based on personal experience. The new solution for production monitoring provides context-specific information for different roles on the store floor and also supports the identification of deviations and the elimination of the causes.

Active task management on smartphone and smartwatch
How can the operator be actively informed and better supported? By identifying the machine operator, personal preferences, their user role and area of responsibility are automatically loaded and the personal task list is displayed on the smartphone and smartwatch. Tasks are prioritized and the operator is alerted dynamically in real time in the event of downtime. The employee is immediately informed of new tasks and supported with context-specific instructions for efficient solutions. If there are new and urgent tasks, the smartphone or smartwatch notifies the operator.

Early detection of deviations through mobile monitoring
The key is that production managers and line managers can see how production is running at any time on their smartphone while on the move. Deviations in all important KPIs can be identified at a glance - for the entire production, individual lines and machines. The selection of important KPIs is application-specific. As soon as manual intervention is required because KPIs are outside the target range, the person responsible is actively notified and supported in identifying and rectifying the causes. If the smartphone does not respond, everything is fine.

Integrated solutions for heterogeneous systems
Intech develops application-specific assistance systems as add-on solutions for production systems. Heterogeneous systems with machines from different manufacturers are connected via public interfaces of the production machines, for example OPC UA, MTConnect, APIs for PLC control or proprietary interfaces, such as Rest interfaces, or by extending the interfaces in cooperation with the machine manufacturers. The existing app libraries are platform-independent and can be flexibly developed further for specific applications. The server libraries can be operated on all common cloud platforms as well as on dedicated servers in the production plant, i.e. on premises. Communication between the server and smart device is secured via WLAN encryption, TLS (https), certificates and authorization on the server. Data is stored on the smart device in encrypted form.

Dr. Klaus Wiltschi/Dr. Michael Sturm, Intech/pb