Uncompromisingly high quality is the benchmark for suppliers and manufacturers in the automotive industry, who must ensure their parts are free from defects. If a fault does occur, it is important to find the cause immediately. Traceability is therefore a must and it is crucial companies can trace all processes, from raw material procurement through production to use and disposal.

However, achieving this means having to obtain more transparency by networking and digitalising production and entire value chains. This increases the need for suppliers to integrate their own production facilities into hybrid cloud infrastructures or get them ready for emerging platforms such as Catena-X, an ecosystem in the automotive sector.

Plant engineering company Schuler and German Edge Cloud have therefore set themselves the goal of helping companies overcome these challenges with an easy-to-use solution. The result is a flagship project in the press shop sector that brings together two very different worlds – software and plant engineering. Thanks to this collaboration, Schuler can offer a track-and-trace solution based on edge-cloud technologies within its digital suite, which is used for digitalization in the press shop.

Schuler is contributing its expertise in metal-forming technology while GEC is providing its know-how in edge and cloud technology. The end result is that Schuler’s customers are getting genuine added value in terms of quality, scalability, cost-effectiveness and transparency in production. Going forward, the solution should also form the basis for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise production.

PORSCHE AND SCHULER RAISE THE BAR

The solution is already being used on a pilot basis in a joint venture by Porsche and Schuler. The Smart Press Shop in Halle is a fully networked facility for the flexible production of car body parts. The project is setting new standards for developments such as predictive maintenance, smart production control and production efficiency. The plan is to use the technology to press parts and components for the entire Volkswagen Group in the future, with other OEMs to follow.

“One of our goals is to raise the production efficiency and digitalization of important stages in automotive production to a new level for metal-forming technology. The first step is to focus on traceability. In the event of a recall, for example, the entire supply chain can be seamlessly traced and the cause of the fault quickly identified,” says Domenico Iacovelli, CEO of the Schuler Group.

Based on consistent data, the track-and-trace software from GEC ensures full traceability within production processes and is compatible with the public clouds of major OEMs and hybrid clouds such as the Schuler Cloud. A significant benefit of the solution is full data sovereignty, which ensures that expertise and critical production data remain in the right hands.