Conveyors do more than simply move parts from point A to point B. They serve as the backbone of an assembly line, and, as such, help manufacturers move forward on their road to success.
The primary purpose of secondary packaging is to ensure the safety of a product during storage and transportation. The integrity of secondary packaging is particularly important with medical devices.
You can’t accuse Volkswagen’s Dirk Voigt of having his head in the clouds—he’ll take it as a compliment. The head of digital production at VW, Voigt and a team of manufacturing and IT pros are developing an industrial cloud computing system to amalgamate production data from more than 120 factories. The objective: greater efficiency and lower costs.
Automotive OEMs love to show off their automated body-in-white assembly lines. Commercials invariably feature dozens of six-axis robots producing showers of sparks in choreographed routines.
BMW has been at the forefront of Industry 4.0 for years. For example, the company was an early adopter of additive manufacturing, and today prints hundreds of thousands of production parts annually.
Like many long-established car manufacturers, the company that would become Škoda Auto started in the early 1890s by making bicycles. Today, you won’t see velocipedes rolling off of Škoda assembly lines, but you just might see plug-in electric vehicles.
Most manufacturers agree that digital transformation is necessary to remain competitive today and thrive tomorrow. Many large companies have already begun initiatives. But, when asked to quantify the impact of those initiatives on the bottom line, they often come up short.
Some of the largest machinery in the world depends on the smooth operation of tiny ball and roller bearings. Knowing this, manufacturers do all they can to make sure that the bearings they purchase for their equipment are completely free of defects.
Process improvement projects have traditionally struggled with obtaining accurate data quickly and easily. In many cases, various data sources provide competing sources of the truth. Smart technologies offer the means to provide a single source of the truth, without the time-consuming and labor-intensive efforts of the past.