The long-established German company Dürkopp Adler has been producing industrial sewing machines for the textile industry since the middle of the 19th century. With "QONDAC", the company has founded a new business unit that deals with the topics of networking, digitalization and automation in production. The aim is to provide optimum support for production processes through analysis and customized digital assistants. This enables customers to identify weak points in the production process at an early stage, plan maintenance better and thus significantly increase productivity.

Today, modern textile production facilities are characterized by a large number of different machine types and workstations that are organized in production lines. When evaluating productivity, often only the network is analyzed and rough key figures such as the daily target output are compared with the daily actual output. However, it is difficult to analyze the actual cause, for example due to individual machines and workstations in terms of their efficiency. The number of work operations and the wear and tear of consumables on an individual machine can usually only be estimated.

Support must therefore always respond flexibly to any problems that arise and have specialist staff on hand for maintenance and repairs, even though the risks to the stability and efficiency of production are constantly increasing as the number of complex, heterogeneous machine types rises. This results in intensive planning and time expenditure. There is also usually no digitalization of work processes in production. Bottlenecks or reasons for underproduction can only be identified with great effort, if at all.

Visual system for monitoring and control

With this in mind, the Cologne-based company X-Integrate has joined forces with Dürkopp Adler to develop the modular Qondac solution kit for its customers. It will also integrate functional modules of a Manufacturing Execution System (MES). The central solution component of Qondac is a visual system for monitoring and controlling industrial production processes. Customers collect machine data from each individual workstation in real time, process it visually and use it as a basis for controlling and optimizing production processes. The system digitally enriches relevant data for orders and products and displays it at the respective workstation. This simplifies the creation and promotes the up-to-dateness of production documents at all workstations and achieves a direct increase in efficiency.

Conditional monitoring

The Industry 4.0 solution gives production managers a detailed insight into the processes at all times. A continuous analysis also determines the exact number of operations that a machine has completed within a production cycle. In this way, processes along the value chain are successively optimized and production is made more efficient, sustainable and digital. Customers can monitor the productivity of each individual production machine in real time, prevent bottlenecks and problems through conditional monitoring or identify them early on and rectify them in a targeted manner. The networked production participants register themselves independently (following the plug-and-work approach) on the central system and independently provide information about the operations carried out. The number of work operations is analyzed in the context of the planned production orders and the workstations can be maintained more efficiently on the basis of this data.