The idea behind Flexcell is that production does not take place in a line but in individual cells. © Ipolog

With assembly in flexible cells and the use of AGVs, worker utilization can be increased by twelve percent.

Ipolog is contributing its research and simulation results from the Flexcell studies with the Boston Consulting Group and other customer projects in order to ensure decisive added value advantages through flexible cell production. It is important that the deviations between the simulated and actual process are made transparent and recalculated at runtime. Matthias Kellermann, co-founder and CEO of Ipolog, believes that the biggest challenge lies in controlling the material flow, as a separate shopping basket has to be picked for each product and each cell. The core of the Flexcell concept is to always make optimum use of the assembly employee's capacity and to prefer to have the orders to be produced waiting for the employees in front of the cells rather than the other way round. It is also important to always be able to react directly to delays or changes in the real process compared to the simulation. To this end, criteria are to be researched to determine when a deviation is so serious that a correction must be made - with potentially far-reaching changes for material handling.

"We are still at the very beginning of an exciting journey towards flexible cell production," says Kellermann. "It is important to start today and to continue along this path step by step. The basis for flexible cell production is completely digitalized assembly and logistics. With the Ipolog software, significant double-digit increases in efficiency can be achieved in the 'classic line' even in the course of this digitalization if assembly processes, employee routes, material provision and the logistics chain are holistically optimized. With a digital twin, you can create clarity today for the challenges of tomorrow. You can be sure that production will run smoothly because you have run through the effects of changes digitally before they cost you a lot of money and nerves in the real factory. Costly surprises during implementation or even production downtimes are a thing of the past. It doesn't matter whether these changes are the result of your optimization ideas or were brought to you from outside. Every day, the digital model becomes more detailed, more intelligent and can show the consequences of your planning decisions even better."

With the Ipolog software, the situation is visualized three-dimensionally in the factory layout exactly as the factory will behave with the respective production program. This means that everyone involved can literally get a picture of the situation and everyone is on the same page. There are various views and aggregation levels to make all the information available to colleagues and superiors. Manually transferring results to PowerPoint is a thing of the past, as are overlooked formula errors in Excel. This means that everyone - from the planner to the owner, from the trainee to the CFO - can see directly in Ipolog how their factory will work. The 3D visualization including animation of assembly employees and logistics resources helps just as much as the KPIs that can be configured for the respective role, which can also be displayed in aggregated form on smartphones, tablets or VR glasses. as