Continental

Background

Working for Global Automotive Parts Leader

Continental is a German multinational automotive parts manufacturing company employing more than 245,000 people in 60 countries and markets. While Continental is known mostly for being the world’s fourth-largest tire manufacturer, it is also ranked third in global OEM automotive parts sales. The Spanish factory, in the city of Barcelona, is one of Continental’s facilities, producing electronic components for car dashboards.

Continental factory in Barcelona.

Goals

Reducing Downtime and Improving Efficiency

The Barcelona manufacturing plant is made up of SMT (Surface Mount Technology) lines of over 40 meters in length. Operators at these lines must be attentive to their tasks and to warnings and incidents along the entire line to avoid any unnecessary stops. Continental required a solution to improve the efficiency of its equipment and reduce downtime to a minimum. For example, if a material ran out at an electronic component placement station, a warning was triggered and the operator had to identify and replace it as soon as possible, otherwise, it resulted in a line stop and a consequent loss of productivity.

Screens were installed on the lines to show alerts, however, this system required operators be attentive to the screens while carrying out their work. This caused distractions in production tasks, plus the response to alerts was not prioritized and did not have resources allocated to respond to them, resulting in a breakdown in coordination.

Continental’s aim was to improve the process by providing the employees with the information they needed just when they needed it without having to constantly look for it on screens.

Challenges

Orchestration of All Data Through a Single IIoT Platform

Continental partnered with Zerintia to achieve the project’s goal by unlocking the maximum possibilities that a fully digital Smart Factory solution can provide. To support the current, and especially future, use cases, the Zerintia IIoT platform, namely its 4ACTION solution, needed to be connected to all existing systems at Continental, including plant production control software (MES), machinery logic controllers (PLC) and the native alert system.

To provide Zerintia’s 4ACTION with accurate the real-time location data of guided vehicles (AGV), Sewio RTLS built for automotive has become an integral and essential part of the digitalization mix.

Solution

Smart Wearables to Boost Productivity

The power of 4ACTION far exceeded the project’s expectations. Based on all the data integrated and received in real time, alerts are generated based on complex events occurring at the plant, automating workflows generated by those alerts, launching actions in response, involving employees, machinery and plant information systems. In short, 4ACTION integrates and orchestrates the information of all the systems, turning it into specific actions, as defined by Continental.

4ACTION allows communication in real time with different employees at the industrial plant, which is key to the project. Operators now use wearable devices to receive all the information they need to carry out their work in a more efficient manner.

Smartwatches for the operators.

When an employee picks up their Smartwatch, they must identify themselves in the system. Each employee is then assigned a role, and the system recognizes the employee and is able to identify the skills and tasks that can be carried out and the type of alerts and notifications that they should receive. The information is made available to the employee to notify them only when their intervention is necessary, without taking their attention away from the tasks they are performing.

For example, during raw material procurement, the system automatically generates a material order in the ERP. This triggers logistics operators to prepare an AGV with the material requested by the production line. When the Sewio-RTLS-tracked AGV reaches the point of delivery, the logistics operator receives a notification on their smartwatch to unload it. 4ACTION reduces the response time caused by lack of materials, reduces the down time of the AGV and significantly increases its operational availability. In short, its commissioning at Continental has reduced unnecessary waiting times by improving the plant’s OEE.

Continental also uses this system to trigger alerts to the maintenance team. The integration of the information from the factory’s MES with the BRMS allows the automatic alerting of a maintenance technician when a specific number of incorrect parts reach the end of the assembly line of electronic components, eliminating any necessary downtime for resolving a possible incident.

List of rules to trigger and process actions.

Results

Increasing Plant OEE While Enabling a 3D Digital Twin

The commissioning of 4ACTION has had a positive impact on Continental’s operations. The most immediate was the integration of all plant systems, logical, physical and human, allowing decisions to be made based on all information integrated into a single IIOT platform.

Other direct impacts include a reduction of incident resolution time, of production line downtime and of the costs of the resources dedicated to monitoring and maintaining production lines.

However, thanks to the IIOT Platform and 4ACTION, the most significant impact is the creation of a digital twin of the 3D plant, allowing visualization, in real time, of all the physical and logical elements of the plant as well as everything that is happening in the plant, including sensors, alerts and processes. The information now available to a connected employee has led to a significant increase in efficiency and productivity.

3D overview of the factory.

Key criteria for choosing Sewio

Key Factors for Choosing Sewio RTLS

• 30 cm accuracy which allows the full flexibility and variability of virtual zones without any changes of infrastructure
• The ability to easily set an unlimited number of virtual zones that can be updated with a single click at any time in the future to adapt to any updates of processes
• Bi-directional seamless third-party integration with a fully-documented Open API
• Proven successful IOT projects using methodology and technology, backed up by unrivalled 10+ years of UWB expertise
• Multi-level support based on SLAs from the people who built the product
• The ability to scale the system easily and quickly to track more objects and expand the system to more halls