Enterprises driving Industry 4.0 goals are enabling higher product customizations, smaller lot size, higher product consistency and better integration with supply chain. This transformation is being supplemented by the need to achieve higher machine and workforce productivity. This trend naturally creates new challenges in ensuring quality of product.

Our client, a global leader in providing manufacturing intelligence software for quality management, wanted to upgrade their existing on-premise solution to support their clients in their Industry 4.0 goals.

We supported this vision of our client by helping to build a multi-tenant cloud-based manufacturing intelligence platform that offers quality as a service. This platform leverages techniques such as statistical process control to create insights from the data. The data can be collected from devices connected via COM ports, IP based devices etc and the collection process can be manual, semi-automatic or fully automatic. The insights that are generated from data can be presented to users as per their needs and this is facilitated through role-based data access, drill down analytics, multiple language support and customizable visualizations.

The product development of this award-winning platform followed an agile scrum model using scrum of scrum framework with a single product backlog. The solution was architected to ensure built-in capability for ensuring high availability and high resilience for minimizing downtime in a smart factory. The solution provides visual representation of the complete manufacturing lines and enables end to end traceability of parts and product. With multiple deployment options – SaaS, Hybrid, On-Premise – the solution provides highest flexibility to clients, while reducing their overall operational costs. The built-in pro-active user assistance helps workers to receive timely notifications which avoids situations that they miss sampling or collection of data, thereby improving the overall quality management. Finally, the intuitive design of the user interface ensures that workers on the shop floor can start using an industry 4.0 solution, without extensive trainings.

Enterprises are regularly offering 24x7 services, which in turn requires that they have dependable infrastructure for their own operations as well for servicing their clients. This infrastructure can be machines in a factory, equipment in field locations, information technology infrastructure or equivalent. Such an infrastructure requires regular maintenance and in situations wherein the infrastructure is not working – it becomes essential to repair it quickly. The repair process can often be complex, necessitating collaboration between technicians in the field and experts in other work locations.

Our client, a leading telecommunications company that provides digital services and communication solutions, wanted to ensure that maintenance and repair operations of their key field infrastructure can be undertaken efficiently.

We developed an assisted reality solution jointly with multiple partners. This solution enables regional field technicians to perform complex maintenance operations on transmitter masts by closely collaborating with remote experts who are maintenance technicians located in an office.

The regional field technician wears a Smart Glass while working on the transmission mast. The assisted reality technology available on Smart Glass helps the regional field technicians to receive step-by-step instructions as per their work order and their hands are free of any device. They are simultaneously connected via a video call to a remote expert who can see the work the regional field technician is doing. The work approval protocol is executed step-by-step and the results are available on a dashboard to the remote expert. During this process, minor defects are rectified by the assembly technician. If real time error correction is not possible then it is documented and evidences are taken in form of pictures or videos.

This solution has helped our client to achieve maintenance acceptance procedure in a quarter of the original amount of time. It helps the technical team working at the transmission masts to collaborate closely with the remote expert in office, leading to a high quality and legally valid sign-off procedure.