Every day, the network handles 18 terabytes of newly generated data. That’s business as usual at the Rittal plant in Haiger. After all, these volumes of data are the very fuel of cutting-edge manufacturing – without it, Rittal wouldn’t be able to produce the 8,000 compact and small enclosures that it has been manufacturing daily since 2019. Getting to this point wasn’t easy, however. “Digital transformation is still hard and groundbreaking work,” comments Markus Asch, CEO Rittal International.

As impressive as operations in the Haiger plant now are, the background history is the most fascinating aspect of all. Sister company German Edge Cloud (GEC) provided support for the plant in central Hesse. A specialist in the digitalization of manufacturing processes, GEC focuses on one simple question – how can software be used to make manufacturing more efficient? Dieter Meuser, CEO Cloud & Industrial Solutions at GEC, neatly sums up the starting point: “The issue tends to be a complete mishmash of machinery and applications. There’s not much point in collecting data here unless you understand it in the context of production as a whole.” The first step was therefore absolutely essential – GEC and Rittal put together mixed teams of specialists from both manufacturing and IT.

OVERCOMING HURDLES IN HAIGER

The issue of collecting and processing data was resolved in a number of stages. Broadly speaking, the data from all machines is now collected, structured hierarchically in a manufacturing execution system (MES) and processed in industrial analytics applications to make it ready for use in manufacturing once more. To do this, GEC developed the ONCITE edge cloud solution – an easy-to-implement Digital Production System consisting of software and hardware. As a result, system maintenance engineers and production planners in the plant can check a dashboard for all the information needed to intervene quickly in factory operations. 

The dashboards are the cockpit of the system that comprises analytics, alerts and live reporting on the status of production. Large monitors visually display what 250 networked machines (equipped with sensors), system components and 20 automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are doing – or, indeed, what they’re not doing. If there is a problem, it can be dealt with swiftly, because information about bottlenecks in ongoing production is provided in seconds, with precise analysis at the ready. Today, a clearer picture is emerging of previous problems. Rittal and GEC initially found themselves facing a whole host of unexpected bumps along the way.

The inconsistent machine data semantics and the balancing out of IT and production complexity were to be expected. However, bottlenecks and missing material in the systems were a vivid reminder of the saying “no pain – no gain”. As Dr Marc Sesterhenn, Managing Director of Operations at Rittal, confirms: “Thanks to ONCITE, we were able to significantly increase transparency across the entire manufacturing process, with close interlinking of production and intralogistics. We can see immediately if a storage space is about to overflow, if a line is at a standstill, if there’s a backlog or if the AGVs are too slow.”

DIGITAL MANUFACTURING

Is it all as good as it sounds? “We really can suck up data from a huge range of sources, collect it in the MES and structure it hierarchically. These smaller- scale packets of data are then combined with the mass data collected – signals and image and sensor data – and displayed on the dashboards as processed production data,” says Meuser. It doesn’t matter whether the data is analysed on premise via edge computing or in the cloud. “What’s more important is that we have fast, high-performance edge cloud technology and that ONCITE can gradually be enhanced with other software solutions and new data.”

TRANSPARENCY OVER EVERYTHING

Key figures displayed on the performance dashboard show the result. The dashboard displays production progress in the form of quantities, cycle times etc. and emits an alarm if a bottleneck occurs. “We recently recorded a fault on the packaging line. Thanks to the dashboard system, this was rectified in less than a minute. We can see immediately how long a line is in autostop for, whether there are pending transport orders for AGVs and what the quantities are per day and per shift,” explains Moritz Heide, Head of System Maintenance and Production Planning at the Rittal plant in Haiger. “This creates transparency and gives us control options across all manufacturing lines and systems,” he continues.

ONCITE therefore makes active manufacturing control possible. The next step being planned is to link SAP ERP to ONCITE so Rittal can see the order backlog and display availability details for orders. “The plant in Haiger, with the GEC solution, really does serve as an example for industry,” confirms Markus Asch, CEO Rittal International.