Smart Services: The digital solutions from FRITSCH

FRITSCH's digital solutions offer a high level of transparency regarding the condition of the equipment by collecting data and making recommendations for action in advance before a component has the chance to fail. The Smart Production Insights (SPI) from FRITSCH were developed as a first step for this purpose. This Smart Service gives production and shift managers real-time insights into the most important performance data of the production line via a clear dashboard. Also, downtimes are clearly recorded, so that measures to prevent them can be initiated quickly and easily.

As a part of the Smart Production Insights, even minor malfunctions that occur occasionally during production are recorded and displayed on the dashboard. So far, it has been impossible for production managers to respond to these brief disruptions because they were not even detected. "Often, these are only fleeting problems that interrupt production for just a couple of seconds. However, if that occurs multiple times during the whole shift, then it all adds up to an unplanned loss of production in the end”, Wolfgang Stegmaier, the project manager for digital development at FRITSCH, explains. Our customers can now inspect the SPI data to find out exactly what causes these faults and take the right steps to prevent further equipment downtimes caused by them,” the data specialist says. It's a little like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The SPI gives valuable indications of where this needle is to be found.

The parent company MULTIVAC has also developed a service for predictive maintenance called the “Watchdog”. As part of the MULTIVAC Group, FRITSCH benefits from the Group’s experience in this area, gained from multiple industries, and uses the service on its IMPRESSA lines. The Watchdog monitors all the drives on the entire line. “It does this by measuring and continuously analysing the motor current and temperature of each drive,” Stegmaier describes how the service works. The FRITSCH technicians have a record of empirical values of drive workloads that are generated when producing certain, specific products on the line. These values were used in the development of the Watchdog. "If the drives only need to run at a partial workload for a certain recipe, then the system should not wait to give warnings only when the maximum output is reached, let alone exceeded,” Stegmaier explains. Instead, as soon as the value calculated by algorithms reaches a specified deviation from the de-fined target value, a warning is sent to a defined group of people, who can react accordingly before the drive unit becomes damaged or even destroyed.

Measuring values and collecting data is, of course, only one aspect of digitalisation. The real customer benefit only arises when unplanned downtimes can be avoided with predictive maintenance. For example, spare parts that customers usually do not keep in stock can then be ordered in good time and built in during scheduled maintenance and repair jobs.