High efficiency and quality are required in the automotive industry

The automotive industry is one of the most advanced industrial sectors. The high degree of automation enables high production efficiency and excellent product quality for high volumes. However, an automated production is vulnerable for faults and production stops. The loss of available production time and the technicians´ time spend for troubleshooting mean a large cost for the manufacturer.

It is therefore vital for production and maintenance technicians to identify the root causes for faults as fast as possible. This troubleshooting process can be very difficult and time-consuming. Common but inconvenient practices for troubleshooting are to wait at the machine or to search through an hour-long video in order to see what cause a stop.

How can you improve and shorten this time and cost-intensive troubleshooting process?

With the help of a smart video system developed for fast and easy troubleshooting in production. The Film The Fault system shows the technician directly the relevant video clip of a stop. The setup of the system is flexible to install at any machine, a robust smartphone records a video at the suspected area at the production line. When the production line has stopped, a dedicated SmartSensor detects and signals this to the phone.

As a result, all relevant video clips with faults get highlighted in the complete video and enable the technician to see what exactly happened and take immediate action.

Improved troubleshooting in production

Thereby, the technician saves time in comparison to the alternatives of standing at the machine or searching for the fault in a long video. Filming with any other camera and analysing this video material requires time to find the fault and typically goes along with large files which are hard to transfer.

A case in the automotive industry showed that a technician could save on average 90 minutes by using the Film The Fault system compared to the alternatives. Assuming an average usage of 4 times a month and an internal hourly cost around 50€ for a maintenance technician, the time saved is worth 300€.

Increasing production efficiency

The quick troubleshooting does not only save time for one technician but the entire production line could be affected by the fault. In the automotive industry are typically many processes interconnected, for example, by pick and place robots or automated delivery of goods by self-driving AGV´s. Therefore, a stop at one process could easily cause an entire line to stand still. Depending on the complexity of the fault reason, a stop could take a couple of minutes up to a few hours to identify and repair the production.

The example case in the automotive industry demonstrated that with the Film The Fault video system, a production stop could be shortened by 30 minutes. Even though such an issue in the production only occurred once a month, the identification of the root cause via the video clip is saving even more time. It enabled the technicians to repair the machines and avoid the production to stop for a second and third time for the same reason in this month.

The hourly rate of a running production line varies depending on which costs or losses are taking into account but in this case it is assumed to be 600€. Consequently, the actual time saving of 30 minutes plus an avoided potential loss of at least another 60 minutes equals a value of 900€ in this month.

So how to save time worth 1.200€

Summarising the time saved for a technician worth 300€ and the production time saved worth 900€ adds up to saved time worth 1.200€ in one month.

On top of that, imaging that more than one person could be involved in the root cause analysis. Or that a production fault could possibly repeat more often than 2 times a month. Then, the value of the saved time might be significantly higher than 1.200€. The actual numbers for each factory differ obviously and depend on the frequency of faults which can be solved by video recording as well as many other factors.