Bosch Connects Measuring Lab with Production

Bosch production planners Andreas Tisljar and Sebastian Schniepp had been working on the idea for a long time — namely, to make it much easier for the 35 machine operators who work in steering-nut production in Schwaebisch Gmuend to use the measurement data. For if the machine operators wanted to identify a trend in production, they previously had to take out the last protocols from a file folder and compare them page by page. “That’s impossible to do in the normal course of business,” says Tisljar.

Given the tolerances that have to be maintained, which are meanwhile “around the size of an Ebola virus,” as Daniel Huebscher from the technology-development department of Bosch likes to describe it, the stability of the processes in Schwaebisch Gmuend depended strongly on the experience of individual employees and whether they happened to have a good or bad day.

They therefore sought a solution that would give the machine workers both an analysis and a graphical representation of the measurement values. “What we wanted could only be achieved with ZEISS PiWeb,” says Schniepp. In order to convince senior management to invest in the software, the production planners predicted that the utilization of the measurement machines could be increased at by least 1%. As it turned out, “we were way too modest,” continues Schniepp. Although a separate project to gather concrete figures was not launched, “we do see a higher utilization of the machines and less scrap,” stresses Tisljar. “Production is running more quietly and the production process has become more stable, especially with inexperienced machine operators,” adds Schniepp.

This is also thanks to the fact that ZEISS PiWeb calculates the correction values. These values indicate by which how much the processing of the part has to be corrected in order to achieve the target value. “By providing these correction values, we’re taking away a lot of work for the machine operators to calculate these values and also reducing error sources,” stresses the production planner. This is especially the case when several processing steps are relevant for a measurement characteristic.