Collecting, processing, and analyzing production data with DSFM+
The digitalization of production and logistics in the automotive industry is characterized by complexity. Production facilities, process steps, and the supply chain are divided into various individual steps that must be digitally mapped step by step. This large-scale digitalization serves to collect and provide data to derive optimization and decision-making measures. In today's reality, the situation is still different: Data is often collected manually or via custom-developed applications in a plant. Motivated by this situation, Volkswagen Group Components developed an intelligent solution called Digital Shopfloor Management+ (DSFM+). With the Digital Production Platform (DPP) embedded in Volkswagens Industrial Cloud, the DSFM+ solution was developed as a scalable application for the entire Volkswagen Group. The DPP is a Volkswagen Group-internal cloud platform for production and logistics, enabling access to live data from more than 100 Volkswagen Group plants. The DSFM+ application collects, processes, and evaluates production data, enabling decisions to minimize and avoid production downtime in the long term. Read in this success story how DSFM+ defines the shopfloor processes in component manufacturing and how the solution is scalable to further Volkswagen Group plants.
With DSFM+ we get the big picture of the shopfloor! The tool is a great support for our experts in production.
Challenge – lack of efficient shopfloor management due to inconsistent and outdated data
Component manufacturing in the automotive industry today is characterized by a high proportion of manual data processing. Although a variety of solutions for automatic data collection exist at many stations in the manufacturing process, in many other areas data is only stored and evaluated manually or inconsistently.
Another challenge is that live data is often not available to the shopfloor experts. As a result, production experts often are not provided with the big picture of the shopfloor, which makes it difficult to derive sustainable optimization measures. Sources of error and actual causes often remain undiscovered and repeatedly disrupt the production process. A significant example of this are undetected micro defects that cause only minor interruptions but generate considerable efficiency losses when viewed over the entire process.
In general, the inconsistent availability of production data leads to additional effort in collecting and preparing the required data, redundant work for production staff and delays in product delivery – in other words, untapped potential for the resource-efficient use of measures.
DSFM+ will help us in our daily business to achieve more transparency in our processes, to make the right decisions based on live data and to control our production more effectively.
Solution– how to manage the shopfloor with just one click!
To increase efficiency in shopfloor management, a large team is developing the DSFM+ solution. The Volkswagen Group's Component plants Polkowice and Chemnitz are the first pilot plants in the creation of the basic module for the KPI, Incident and Action management features of DSFM+. Software engineers from the Volkswagen Software Development Center in Dresden (SDC) supports the development and integration of the application. To gradually add more features to DSFM+, the team is collaborating with many other plants, such as Brunswick, Salzgitter, and Kassel so that functions for predictive maintenance, tool management, value stream and predictive quality features are already in development.
The DSFM+ solution is available to users in two versions: The desktop application displays an overview of machines, evaluates produced pieces and machine losses, automatically calculate the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and can be used for analysis and derivation of optimization measures. The tablet version of DSFM+ also shows an overview of machines and is primarily used to explain downtimes and their causes.
The agile product development process enabled the realization of the two DSFM+ products for desktop and tablet, with over 60 machines already connected when the first minimum viable product (MVP) was connected at the end of 2020 in Polkowice at Volkswagen Motor Polska and at the Volkswagen Group Component plant in Chemnitz. The machines that could be connected were, for example, process machines and portals for milling, screwing, or washing, end of line machines. At the beginning of 2021, more than 200 machines could already be connected when the second MVP was connected.
And that was just the beginning: the DSFM+ team is currently planning further modules, such as the development of a reporting module for shopfloor management.
DSFM+ is the result of the Digital Production Platform development strategy. As a customer-focused development, it creates added value and enthusiasm among our users and at the same time contributes to the development of central, reusable platform components.
Key benefits – the path to transparency across the entire production and supply chain
In the long term, DSFM+ is expected to completely replace manual data entry. It makes many legacy systems obsolete, and bottlenecks can be identified and eventually eliminated throughout production by deriving measures through data transparency across the entire production process. In this manner, the DSFM+ solution enables efficient shopfloor management by creating transparency, comparability, and the ability to analyze data across plants. This allows knowledge to be transferred between plants and Volkswagen brands, functions to be scaled quickly via the cloud, and synergies to be achieved in operations and support. Not only does this increase speed of response, significantly reduce administrative effort, and improve data quality by identifying causes of errors, but also contributes significantly to the future viability and competitiveness of all Volkswagen Group Component plants and, on this basis, to all Volkswagen Group brands. The rollout to further plants is already planned for 2022, and beyond Volkswagen Group Components, a rollout to the entire Volkswagen Group is possible.