Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) is a multidisciplinary approach. It requires the parallel advancement of several technological pillars, including devices such as sensors, quality inspection systems, industrial informatics, data analysis, and knowledge management. Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to implementing analytics, such as machine learning, regression analysis and more, on time series data collected during production processes.
However, other types of data, such as written text, which acquire the knowledge and experience of people working in production environments, addressing and solving quality issues in production, can be very useful for ZDM needs.
Industrial Social Network (ISN) solutions can be very efficient to meet communication needs in a productive environment as they allow informal communication, more attractive to users, about incidents/events occurring in a workplace and the exchange of best practices. As a result, using ISN solutions to gain informal knowledge sharing among employees of a manufacturing company, combining data from IIoT platforms and analysis of unstructured textual data, can prove very valuable in serving ZDM goals.
We Plus, as part of the H2020 MANUWORK project “Balancing Human and Automation Levels for the Manufacturing Workplaces of the Future”, has developed the RAPpID ISN solution that is used by the personnel involved in the production process (engineers, line operators, maintenance personnel, etc.).
This enables the sharing of knowledge of past and new best practices for line operations, the sharing of lessons learnt, as well as the improvement of connectivity and socialization between:
• employees and line operators working in the production area
• engineers/other experts working in other parts of the production plant
• external operators (e.g. suppliers, other colleagues in other structures of the company, etc.)
All in order to raise immediate problems, trying to solve them and thus reducing downtime, improving quality and reducing production losses.
So, the goal of ISN4ZDM is the integration of RAPpID ISN into ZDMP in order to extend ZDMP with an additional “component” that provides new knowledge-based services to ZDM. RAPpID integrates existing ZDMP capabilities with new features aimed at combining the tacit knowledge of employees with IIoT data (events, incidents, analytics, etc.) that are typically used for ZDM purposes.
RAPpID benefits from the integration with ZDMP both from the point of view of the business but also from the technological aspects.
Through its integration with ZDMP, you will have access to a large base of ZDMP’s potential customers.
In addition, by integrating RAPpID with ZDMP, the “moving data” or “data at rest” managed by ZDMP will be accessible to RAPpID users via a dedicated dashboard, allowing employees to use the typical functions of social networks such as commenting, discussing, indicating “Likes”, posts, etc., on these IIoT-based events. User textual input will be combined with IIoT data in a knowledge-base database implemented by LMS using ontology semantics and technology.