Efficient quality management in manufacturing with an MES and IIoT

Quality incidents can occur in all areas of the shop floor. In order to be able to guarantee their customers the highest possible quality at all times, efficient quality management is essential for manufacturing companies. However, manual work slows down the quality management processes considerably and can also be the cause of disruptions while exchanging information with other areas in the company. An MES with an IIoT platform forms the basis for ensuring efficient work in quality management.

Quality management on the shop floor

Whether in the warehouse, in production or in logistics. Quality incidents can occur throughout the entire shop floor. A quality incident always occurs when goods do not have the quality that the customer expects, e.g. due to damage caused by the customer's own fault or the fault of others. In this case, the responsible quality manager first assesses the condition of the affected material, raw material, intermediate or finished product. Can the goods be offered to the original customer at a reduced price despite any defects? Or are the goods completely unusable for the planned order because it is not to be expected that the customer will still be interested in them despite their defective condition? Are the goods still usable at all or does the product even have to be recycled? The quality manager's assessment is decisive for further action and also influences the work of other departments. Sales staff can use the data provided by quality management, for example, to contact the affected customer and make an appropriate offer on more favourable terms. Furthermore, the sales department can also offer the goods to all those customers for whom 2A goods are basically interesting.

Analogue processes influence process reliability and lead to inefficiencies

In most companies, the recording of quality incidents is still a mostly analogue and therefore paper-consuming process. This costs the responsible quality manager a lot of time and also, with a lot of work, does not always provide a high-quality data basis for decisions, e.g. in 2A sales. After the quality incident has usually been recorded manually on a form and the defective goods have been photographed using a digital compact camera, the analogue data must then be merged with the digital data in a report. Scanning the form, which was previously filled out by hand, does not only result in an additional work step. Switching from analogue to digital media can also cause media disruptions in the transmission of information. In addition to inefficiencies due to additional work, transmission errors also occur here. Similarly, the overall process stability and speed can suffer from analogue processes in quality management, as these also affect other areas of the company. For sales staff, for example, it is sometimes very difficult to read out the relevant data from handwritten slips of paper on the one hand and the resulting entries in the ERP system on the other. However, it is precisely this information that is particularly relevant for sales, as it is absolutely necessary, for example, for the preparation of offers. In some cases, this information is manually transferred from the ERP system into Excel spreadsheets and then sent to potential customers.

Efficient quality management with IIoT

An MES IIoT platform such as toii® from thyssenkrupp Materials IoT can digitise these processes and thus significantly simplify the workflows in the area of quality management. With the help of a mobile industrial scanner with photo function, information on the goods recorded in the ERP system can be retrieved via any modern web browser and edited or enriched in real time. An integrated camera also makes it possible to take and transmit photos of the goods and their damage directly and without the use of additional cameras and storage media. Digitally recorded data and protocols in this context particularly increase the quick and easy traceability of individual orders. The comprehensive digitalisation of data processing ensures both an increase in efficiency in quality management and higher process reliability overall. Users can create the required interface to the ERP system directly through the modular IIoT platform toii®. Via the toii®.Integrator module, data from external systems such as MES or ERP systems can be connected to the toii® platform and combined, for example, with the data from the digital quality recording of the production process.