The modern manufacturing of products constantly poses new challenges for production employees, quality departments, maintenance, materials management and also production management:
prodwatch addresses these problems with a unique combination of industrial hardware and suitable software for a wide range of functions in the digitization of assembly workstations. In addition to the simple display of pdf documents at the workstations, the worker assistance system also brings detailed step-by-step instructions for any number of product variants. In this way, entire assembly processes can be mapped using checklists, image and video recordings, pdf documents, material lists and much more. You can easily create the work steps yourself with the integrated drag-and-drop editor and refine them further and further. By using the work steps defined in this way, a data treasure of your production is created, which you can use for production optimizations or process improvements. With prodwatch you become a little bit better every day!
Intelligent worker assistance systems like our prodwatch solution enable you to solve these challenges. With the help of digital end devices such as tablets or touch panels at the individual workstations, information about the assembly process can be communicated easily. Documents such as drawings or work plans no longer need to be looked up in file folders, but can be accessed at the touch of a finger. Step-by-step instructions provide new employees in particular with confidence, even for complex assembly work. Incorrect assembly or other quality problems can be minimized or even completely avoided through integrated checks. This reduces waste and ensures satisfied end customers for your products. However, if errors or questions arise in the assembly process, the employee can alert the shift supervisor or other departments directly. All data on the manufacturing process is stored centrally in a database and can be used for optimizations or also a quality certificate for your customer.
Our free whitepaper gives you practical ideas and implementation suggestions for your worker assistance system. From the simple display of pdf documents to comprehensive step-by-step instructions for different product variants, much is already possible in the standard with prodwatch. Let us inspire you!
In practice, there are many different functions of worker assistance systems. In principle, every digital tool in manufacturing is a component of a manufacturing assistance system. When selecting software for assembly digitization, it is important to ensure that the solution is scalable. Thus, we recommend that our customers start with a test system or with a simple range of functions and build up the solution in an agile manner, i.e. gradually, as part of the continuous improvement process. The most important functions, which are very often the starting point for the introduction of a worker assistance system, are listed below:
Many work and assembly steps in production processes are constantly being optimized and adapted. New products are also coming onto the market at an ever faster frequency and have to be manufactured in new production processes. It is therefore important that the work steps displayed at the assembly stations can be created easily and quickly and adapted again and again.
Similar to our Andon boards, work steps can be created in a graphical editor and then assigned to individual assembly stations. When creating assembly steps, we provide you with a variety of different widgets that can be freely placed on the screen using drag-and-drop. In addition to simple display elements such as actual or target piece counts, the editor also contains widgets for the local display of production line malfunctions, checklists for work content, nested material lists, pdf displays, and elements for video or image material to be displayed in the work step.
Once the work steps have been designed, they can also be dragged and dropped onto the individual assembly stations. All work steps can be provided with a target cycle time, so that it is possible to clock out the work stations directly. This makes it possible to see at a glance which assembly stations have a high workload and, if necessary, steps can be taken such as shifting work content to less busy stations.
Andon boards provide key figures, inform about malfunctions or serve as a platform for other message text. In this way, all employees are on the same level.
In the event of downtime, the right employee must be informed. The employee receives the notification either by phone call, e‑mail, SMS or app notification.
If a machine malfunction occurs, it must happen quickly! Digital input options save a lot of time and reliably call for help.
The use of Andon solutions promises a reduction in disruptions. For this, data on disruption times and the reasons for the disruption are an indispensable source of information.
Manufacturing processes are sometimes very complex and the impact of individual systems on them is therefore difficult to quantify. prodwatch is versatile and shows potential for savings and improvements in almost any production environment. Analyses at our customers show that prodwatch reaches the break-even point after less than one year. After using prodwatch, we were able to determine the following empirical values from customers in various industries.
Over many years, we have accumulated a wealth of experience that has been incorporated time and again into our standard solution prodwatch. We are happy to share this treasure and our innovative products and solutions with you. We are always happy to see new productions every day and to help our customers to optimize them. With us, you have a fast, experienced and flexible partner who, despite standard software, also keeps an eye on your processes. Feel free to contact us, we look forward to hearing from you!