Networking quality data intelligently
Industry 4.0 and increasing digitization are the most important topics affecting the global economy. That is why ZEISS is helping its customers with their digital transformation – this includes integrating measuring machines into upstream systems such as ERP and production planning. ZEISS will present one particular approach at the Control trade fair in Stuttgart, 26-29 April.
Holger Blum, Product Manager for Software at the ZEISS Industrial Metrology business group, explains: "This approach is still not a product. It's more of a networking concept." However, what will be presented at Control is far more than just a general idea. Very particular technologies and solutions for helping individual ZEISS customers successfully advance their networking will be presented under the banner of MDM. Blum explains: "We're going to present networking options which have already been realized. These will give you a preview of our forthcoming product which is scheduled for launch in 2017 and will help companies push their digitization forward."
Data transparency increases customer benefit
Measuring machines from ZEISS already offer numerous sensors and connectors which collect extremely diverse information, e.g. the temperature of the production facility or the environment along with recorded vibrations and collisions. In the future, heads of production and metrology engineers will be able to display this information using a web app. This web app will process the data transmitted by the networked measuring machines and visualize them in a manner that is easy even for measuring technology novices to understand. Metrology engineers will be able to better plan and consequently increase the uptime of their machines because the data on their current use and capacity collected by the measuring machines are also displayed on the dashboard.
And if the operator grants ZEISS access to the web application and the available data, then service engineers will even be able to use different evaluation algorithms to decide if or when individual wear parts need to be replaced. It will also be possible to more easily perform maintenance remotely for certain problems by having access to these numerous data.
The benefits of the central data bank and evaluating them at the company are obvious: measuring certainty, capacity and planning security increase while maintenance and repair times are reduced. "With this data transparency, service engineers will no longer have to make a second trip to a customer's site because they did not bring the appropriate wear part with them," says Holger Blum.
Integration into other systems
But the clear advantages of networking go beyond just maintaining and operating the machines: by linking to a cloud application, the transfer of information to up-steam systems can be performed without any problems. The capacity data for the particular measuring machines will be transferred to the ERP and processed. Blum says: "This is how problems affecting day-to-day production, such as improperly placed planning code numbers, will be minimized or even eliminated with this future ZEISS solution."