For optimum control of product quality, Banner relies on a high production depth. Its 560 production employees produce nearly all the components in¬-house that they need to make finished batteries on Banner’s six assembly lines. This includes the plastic parts for the battery cases as well as the paste-filled lead oxide grids. Their production involves two to five¬ days rest in maturing chambers to create optimum current absorption and storage capacity. Banner’s ongoing success was accompanied by a continuous, organic growth of the production facilities, adding or extending hall after hall until the complex filled the site that had seemed ever so spacious when the company moved here from a smaller place in 1959. These developments led to a heterogeneous production environment. “This confronts us with significant challenges, particularly concerning intra¬logistics issues, such as scheduling for the maturing chambers,” says Franz Dorninger, technical director at Banner. “We contemplated various ways to overcome this problem, including relocating to new premises.”

Benteler has a small pipe business area for which they produce fuel lines and coolant lines made of aluminum for Porsche and other car manufacturers. One of the problems in production was that when Benteler added new products, production had too much downtime.

Many large manufacturers in and outside Japan are competing for larger market share in the same space, expecting a growing demand for projectors in the areas of entertainment, which requires glamor and strong visual performance as well as digital signage that can attract people’s attention. “It is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate ourselves with stand-alone hardware products,” says Kazuyuki Kitagawa, Director of Service & Support at Panasonic AVC Networks. “In order for Panasonic to grow market share and overall business, it is essential for us to develop solutions that deliver significant added value.” Panasonic believes projection failure and quality deterioration should never happen. This is what and has driven them to make their projectors IoT-enabled. More specifically, Panasonic has developed a system that collects data from projectors, visualizes detailed operational statuses, and predicts issues and address them before failure occurs. Their projectors are embedded with a variety of sensors that measure power supply, voltage, video input/ output signals, intake/exhaust air temperatures, cooling fan operations, and light bulb operating time. These sensors have been used to make the projector more intelligent, automatically suspending operation when the temperature rises excessively, and automatically switching light bulbs. Although this was a great first step, Panasonic projectors were still not equipped with any capability to send the data over a network.

Intralox strives to create significant economic value for our customers by optimizing their conveyance systems. Intralox wants to emulate real-world production environments for end users and OEMs working in multiple industries, including packaging, warehousing, parcel, beverage, brewery, food, tire, and consumer goods. They frequently had to perform physical tests to demonstrate to customers how ARB equipment would handle their products.

ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe found itself in the position of needing to replace, step by step, the models it had programmed itself to manage the production of various grades of steel with a solution equipped to face the demands of the future. The solution had to be easy to integrate and designed to be rolled out step by step. ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe uses its automation systems to manage the whole production process at its company steel plants. This is done using clever algorithms that map the functional relationships across all stages of the steel production process. However, there are still a host of other changeable factors that influence the quality of the product obtained, and these also need to be factored in in the form of rules or formulae. What ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe was looking for was a suitable piece of software to fulfill this rule-based management function.

In the housing industry, around 60,000 small to midsize housing builders are creating images and calculating the estimated cost of each project based on the requirements of home owners. Due to the huge selection of products and options, it usually takes around one week and cost for users to create images using CAD tools in addition to picking out products from multiple vendor product catalogs.

To digitally expand their business, Pine Printshop was looking for a catalog-based site that would help people buy ready-made products (e.g. apparels, board pins, stickers, etc.) and even allow customers to personalize their own t-shirts, caps, and hoodies.