Intelligent automation aids safety

Much of the product development work has its roots in the trend to develop new systems to meet the challenges of Industry 4.0 compliance.

Industry 4.0 captures the desire to work at removing “human machine interfaces” seen by their very nature as being a potentially vulnerable area simply due to the sometimes unpredictable nature of human behaviour and replace them with more automated computer driven systems. Here in the UK Industry 4.0 is still a really new concept but already another tag is being widely used to coin the concept more clearly – Smart Factory.

Two of the latest “smart factory” solutions from Werma are designed to improve transparency of operation, identify bottlenecks and disruptions to the production flow and lead to improvements in service and efficiency by taking cost and wastage out of the operation. They are both based on andon lights incorporating intelligent systems being used in simple processes to monitor operations in manufacturing and logistics. The systems embrace the principles of andon lights being deployed to signal the safe operation of equipment or a hazardous condition and at the same time make a significant contribution towards eliminating costly and often inaccurate data collection and process warning hitherto very much a task undertaken by man or mean with clipboards and manual task sheets to be completed.

How does Andonspeed work?

A signal tower is manually activated by a member of staff on the shop floor to call for help from the appropriate service. By just pressing a button a signal light is illuminated on the workstation, clearly indicating the call for action required. The call for action can also be sent automatically by-email to the service concerned and response times can be monitored.

Intuitive and easy to use – Andonspeed is quick to install, the simple activation of traditional traffic light colours green, red and amber make it suitable even for unskilled or seasonal staff.

The system uses conventional andon lights to indicate changes in status of the machine as it moves, for example from a productive state indicated by the green light to a non- productive state amber/red. This status change is transmitted wirelessly to WIN software which presents clients with real time views of the operating conditions of the machines. Information is stored on a database which enable the client to produce with a couple of mouse clicks reports detailing the uptime/downtime detail of the machines and other information such as quantities produced and fault codes generated.

The system will send automatically e-mails to those people responsible for intervening and getting the machines up and running again.

Improved process and safety control need not always have to been hugely expensive and totally new solutions being developed – often, as has been illustrated her, real progress can be made through the development of basic systems to meet new challenges.