Chassis experts on the fast track when it comes to data analysis

When people think of thyssenkrupp BILSTEIN, they first think of high-speed cars and high-performance shock absorbers instead of big data and digitalization. However, these modern technologies make the famous driving pleasure on the road possible in the first place. Dr. Alex Birnkraut, data scientist at thyssenkrupp BILSTEIN, knows why and tells us how he and his team are driving digitalization forward at BILSTEIN.

As a data scientist Dr. Alex Birnkraut always has a finger in the pie at thyssenkrupp BILSTEIN when it comes to processing, storing and analyzing production data on a large scale. So it's no surprise that Birnkraut and his team are also involved in BILSTEIN's latest digitalization project: the "Connected Factory".

Advantages of the digitalization for the shock absorber specialists

Experts understand the term „Connected Factory“ to mean a data architecture that makes the current status of production available through a unified and secure connection of all machines with subsequent data storage and can thus meet various requirements. In short: "The Connected Factory contributes to the transparency of our production processes and enables us to quickly provide data for ad hoc analyses," explains Dr. Alex Birnkraut.

In addition to data transparency, a Connected Factory also reduces the maintenance effort of the production-related software landscape due to the introduced standardization. "The great opportunities lie in the available data pool, which offers very broad possibilities for optimizing internal processes," explains Birnkraut enthusiastically. "We need to understand exactly where there is room for improvement in our processes. Then we can optimize the process in a focused and efficient manner or communicate the results to our customers. It also allows us to present production steps in a comprehensible way," says the expert.

Big data and the beginning of the Connected Factory

The "Connected Factory" project is an internal development at thyssenkrupp BILSTEIN. At the start of the project, Alex Birnkraut's team exchanged experiences with other companies and experts in the field of big data: "At the beginning, we talked to thyssenkrupp's steering business and also exchanged ideas with experts from Microsoft and Intel outside our group of companies," says Dr. Alex Birnkraut.

The incentive for the project was a very heterogeneous and unclear structure in the backup of production data, the team recalls. "The old approach made it impossible to respond quickly to requests because data processing took too long," says Birnkraut, describing the time before the Connected Factory was introduced. With the new approach, it should now be possible to access data quickly and start proactive analyses.

Thanks to the unified approach and a central logic, the data is now immediately available and can be checked right away through dashboards. In this way, the Connected Factory system ensures that the data quality is correct. But where do you actually start when you want to digitalize an entire production? "First, we determined the strengths and weaknesses of our existing software applications," explains Alex Birnkraut. "In addition, we bundled our own requirements with those of our customers."

Requirements for the success of Connected Factory concepts

An investment with a lot of savings potential, as a test phase at thyssenkrupp BILSTEIN's Romanian plant confirms: "In our plant in Romania, it was possible to start a small analysis based on the data from the Connected Factory concept, which made a savings potential of about 100,000 euros per year visible." 100,000 euros per year at just one location – that gives an impression of the enormous savings potential that the use of big data makes possible.

But before a Connected Factory can be successfully integrated, a number of requirements have to be met – from the technology for data storage to the expertise of the team. "To read out the machine control, we use protocols from Open Platform Communications (OPC) or Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). To store the data, we have so far used SQL databases. In these, data is sorted into fixed table schemas. Soon, we will add NoSQL databases, which do not have a fixed table schema," explains the expert. The much more important requirement, Alex Birnkraut reveals, is the expansion of internal know-how. This includes not only knowledge of the relevant technologies, but also of the company's own internal production processes.

According to Birnkraut, the biggest challenge is the change process in the organization: "Creating awareness that data quality is already important when all processes still seem to be running stably and only daily work with the data ensures lasting quality. This has to be mastered in order to make the best use of the Connected Factory and make it a natural part of our everyday work."

Future prospects for the Connected Factory

For BILSTEIN, the next steps towards the Connected Factory are the final connections of all prepared plants worldwide and data validation by the relevant departments. "This last step in particular is absolutely necessary in order to be able to develop further steps towards digitalization such as machine learning algorithms," says the expert.

Dr. Birnkraut thinks that modern production control will no longer work without concepts such as Connected Factory in the future. This is driven by two factors: on the one hand, the company's own internal optimization of production steps and processes and on the other hand, requirements from customers for whom a product is only complete with the corresponding data.

The development of the data science is closely linked to the first factor. "The classic analysis options reach their limits at a certain point. That's why the small optimization steps and data science projects will become more and more important in the future," the data scientist is certain.

More digitalization topics from thyssenkrupp can be found in our Digi Stories.