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 movements of orders on the shop floor.

The INDUTRAX tracking solution enables 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 making better decisions on a visual basis for machine control. The use of FINDERAPP and SHOPFLOORAPP on mobile devices provides access to real-time information and allows to digitally update changes outside the offices. Team leaders are able to define events in the software to automate administrative tasks like 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 BLE 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 the 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 longterm goal is to improve production efficiency, process control and automation. We can use data for improving quality evaluation of our products and do automatic bookings by integrating location solutions into our ERP-system.“

CRISTOPH PETER
HOOperational Excellence Digital at EJOT