BACKGROUND
EJOT, headquartered in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, is a group of medium-sized companies with production sites in Europe, North and South America as well as Asia. The manufacture of the diverse fastening elements is organised in a build-to-order approach with multiple hundreds of active orders at any time.
CHALLENGE
The processing of orders comprises several production steps, partly across plants and subcontractors, with variable routings. 
Work tasks on the shop floor are executed only partly based on digital means and still feature media disruption to paperwork. Organising effective shop floor operations, as well as production and logistics planning and scheduling with respect to avoiding non-value add working time, is a challenging and time-consuming manual task on a daily base.
SOLUTION
EJOT has digitised various use cases in production and logistics across multiple plants with INDUTRAX Location Aware products and location data from Quuppa RTLS to gain automatic transparency on the movements of orders on the shop floor.
The INDUTRAX tracking solution enables the digital execution of work tasks on the shop floor in interaction with the production planning and control system SAP PP by providing access to real-time location data through individual user interfaces. A list of prioritised orders, along with a map of order locations, helps to make better decisions on a visual basis for machine control. Using FINDERAPP and SHOPFLOORAPP on mobile devices provides access to real-time information and allows changes to be updated digitally outside the offices. Team leaders are able to define events in the software to automate administrative tasks, e.g. shipment notifications or the blocking of orders. Location Aware Reports provide insights into historical data on movements of the inventory as an input into lean manufacturing initiatives to foster continuous improvement.
Up to 8000 production orders are tracked simultaneously indoors by the Quuppa real-time location system using Quuppa-certified active Bluetooth® Tags from BlueUp. GPS Trackers of Teltonika enable transparency about the whereabouts of costly assets outdoors. The raw location data is processed by the INDUTRAX software to produce a ‘digital twin’ of the factory. Orders can be effectively found on the shop floor through the LED of the tag using a pick-to-light feature
BENEFITS
EJOT has a significantly improved overview of the status of orders in production and can find individual orders needed for the next processing step even faster without the use of paper. Search times have decreased by 75%.
With increased transparency, errors are avoided, such as the unintentional use of blocked orders. The data collected by the software on process steps and dwell times for each order enables better decisions to be made when rescheduling is necessary, which also reduces non-value-added working time, such as unplanned transport of orders between different buffer areas, and forms the basis for continuous process improvements. The result is increased throughput in production and the creation of the necessary transparency of the production processes.
NEXT STEPS
The location-aware solutions are one important element of EJOT’s bigger goal towards Industry 4.0. In the coming years, EJOT is continuously expanding the solution to other facilities around the globe and will be including data from subcontractors to gain even more transparency about their complete Supply Chain.
“Our management decided to make the roll-out globally because the INDUTRAX solution with Quuppa technology worked so well in our harshest production site in Tambach-Dietharz, which is a historic building cluttered with metal. We first focused on digitising the use cases around Searching and Finding orders, as it was the biggest pain point for us in shop floor operations. But this is just the start and we expect to get huge benefits from location-aware solutions in the future. Our long-term goal is to improve production efficiency, process control and automation. We can use data for improving the quality evaluation of our products and do automatic bookings by integrating location solutions into our ERP system.“
CHRISTOPH PETER
HO Operational Excellence Digital at EJOT
EJOT is a medium-sized group of companies specialising in advanced fastening technology. The EJOT customers are primarily from the automotive and supplier industries, electrical engineering, electronics and construction.
EJOT offers a broad range of innovative fastening elements, such as self-tapping screws for metal and plastics, engineered plastic and metal formed parts, as well as a complete range of fasteners for roofing and cladding and our ejotherm® programme for fixing External Thermal Insulation Composite Systems. 
EJOT develops solutions for all joining and fastening problems in close cooperation with the customer. The goal is to use “intelligent” EJOT products to secure the quality of the joint and, at the same time, decrease the overall costs.
For more information, visit: www.ejot.com
INDUTRAX GmbH is a leading provider of Location Aware Software and solutions that enable the combination of various technologies for location, identification and sensing with enterprise logistics and production control systems.
We live up to our motto, “We are location”, by focusing on solutions in manufacturing and logistics where the capturing of events from movements plays a major role. This differentiates our solutions from conventional Industry 4.0 approaches, which are mostly concerned with the management of stationary machines, devices and detectors.
For more information, visit: www.indutrax.net
