Press Release - 22 June 2017
Due to the international Industry 4.0 movement, the philosophy of integrated data management in quality and production management has received a sustainable dynamic impulse. What the producers of the Manufacturing Execution Systems such as the company from Ulm, GUARDUS Solutions AG, have been bringing to the market for 15 years now is finding a large audience in the meantime: All of the participants in the production and processes must be digitalised, not only when dealing with the increasing omnipresence of product and process data, but also in the underlying methods. In the process control, the increasing automation will make formalist paper ways and time-intensive laboratory techniques become obsolete thereby allowing the introduction of agile in-process methods. Learning systems and lean inspection processes will take over the control. This development is supported not only by the modern MES principles, but also by the norm landscape. The QMS standard “IATF 16949” published by the International Automotive Task Force in October 2016 at last stipulates a close networking between quality and production.
Ever since, the Manufacturing Execution System GUARDUS MES has concentrated on the seamless interaction of quality and production in the value-added chain. It is only when product and process data are united in a homogeneous database that the responsible persons will able to identify the deviations regarding the process stability, safety and quality as well as to intervene in order to eliminate them. What sounds as ‘state of the art’ today, was absolutely revolutionary some years ago. “The integrated data management represented a contradiction to the ivory towers in which many industrial companies were sitting in. Development, production and quality were separated topics not only in the way of thinking, but also in that of acting, which was reflected in a department-oriented data management. A holistic MES was hardly conceivable in many places”, remembers Simone Cronjäger, member of the Executive Board of GUARDUS Solution AG.
A development embraces new (F)norms
For three years now, a new development has been gaining ground: Quality and production management are clearly moving towards an interlocked way of thinking and acting throughout the entire manufacturing process. The separation that has existed until now begins to dissipate. “If we consider the effects of digitalisation from the point of views of automation, process control and mobility, all the modifications of the shop floor will also concern the quality areas”, continues Simone Cronjäger.
This development is also visible in the “IATF 16949”. The QMS standard published by the International Automotive Task Force in October 2016 is clearly more extensive than its predecessor “ISO TS 16949” when referring to holistic processes, and it also stipulates a close networking between quality and production. The approach of the new standard should help in understanding “that it is not a process which is considered in an isolated way, but rather the totality of all of the coactive processes of a company which decisively influence the quality performance of said company”. Thus, the table of contents contains various topics regarding production which have never been at least mentioned in the previous edition, such as the way of acting in case of process releases, the validation after production downtime or the production planning and maintenance, as well as the monitoring and measuring of production processes – thus also genuine disciplines of production management (production and machine data acquisition). “What we have been experiencing in and together with our software for 15 years, now becomes a daily routine, a development which makes us very happy”, said Cronjäger.
