“Receiving the award means a great success for Dürr's DXQ software, which helps car manufacturers to an intelligent and maintenance-friendly production. This is an important milestone for Dürr as a driver of digitalization in production technology”, says Reiner Schmid, President and CEO of Dürr China. The award of “Excellent Supplier of Intelligent Equipment Management Solutions for China's Automobile Industry” was given by the Automotive Intelligent Manufacturing Technology Center of the China Association of Plant Engineering (CAPE).
To receive the award, the recommendation of an OEM was a prerequisite. Several automobile enterprises evaluated and recommended Dürr based on the assessment of relevant departments such as manufacturing, quality management, procurement, and service. In addition to reviewing the application documents, the subsequent selection process included a jury visit and on-site assessment of the applications. Dürr convinced the committee with its digital product family DXQ and its use in SAIC Volkswagen's intelligent paint shop in Anting.
The plant is a benchmark of Dürr’s combined know-how in the fields of mechanical process technology and digitalization. In Anting, SAIC Volkswagen produces various electric and conventionally powered vehicles with a capacity of 120 bodies per hour, which is twice that of a standard paint shop. Dürr provided this paint shop with all plant engineering and the most comprehensive DXQ software portfolio to date. Over the 18-month project duration, six international product development teams from Dürr worked with up to ten developers in each case on the new technologies. They coordinated closely with SAIC Volkswagen in short sprints as is customary in agile development.
In the Anting paint shop, Dürr implemented customized DXQ software solutions for plant operation, analysis and control: DXQcontrol is used for higher-level plant control. It enables the life cycle of each body to be tracked from beginning to end. This starts with receipt of a production order, whereby the order information is translated into concrete production steps. In addition to order data management, the DXQbusiness.intelligence module is also used in a new form. For the first time, consumption data such as energy, water, or air usage can be evaluated historically over long periods, which lays the foundation for sustainable plant operation. The maintenance software DXQequipment.maintenance has interfaces to the plant equipment’s almost 130 controllers and uses them to determine each piece of equipment’s need for maintenance based on up-to-date information like operating hours or counter readings. The state-of-the-art analytics software DXQplant.analytics aims at improving the first-run-rate of a production system. It correlates recorded quality results with order data (production number, derivative, color, etc.) and process data on the basis of artificial intelligence to identify patterns. A broad base of data makes it possible to track fault causes in a targeted way and define measures. In this way, the system can be permanently optimized.