Ubisense Smart Factory: Delivering Never Before Possible Visibility for Manufacturers Worldwide

By Adrian Jennings, CTO Americas

This week, Ubisense announced enhancements to its Smart Factory system that will be available early next year.  Admittedly, we’ve been a tad quiet about Smart Factory so I thought I’d formally introduce you to one of the most advanced location intelligence offerings available to manufacturers today. Ubisense Smart Factory is a production-certified system that helps manufacturers sustain continuous flow, optimize efficiency and reduce errors in manual assembly processes. By accurately identifying and locating process-critical assets, Smart Factory provides real-time operational awareness, adaptive control and data-driven insights. Using a sophisticated system that combines advanced hardware (tags and sensors) with software, Ubisense Smart Factory can reveal an entirely new level of visibility to help manufacturers gain efficiencies at a level never before possible. Think massive improvements in quality, productivity, and operational control and costs – all which help manufacturers more effectively manage mass product customization, which is where our world is headed. For instance, in 2012, car buyers in Europe had 190 different car model choices. In 2019, the number will increase to an estimated 230 different models[1]. Producing that level of variation requires a substantial number of different parts and processes.  How can manufacturers possibly maintain quality by delivering on the demand for customization and choice? Ubisense Smart Factory. Want to learn more about Smart Factory? Click here to access a video showcasing one example of how Ubisense helped BMW: http://ubisense.net/en/resources/videos.html.

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[1] PwC Autofacts 2014 Q2 Data Release

Don’t Get Lost in the Hype

By Adrian Jennings, CTO Americas

Yesterday, I hosted a webinar, Visibility in Manufacturing: The Path to Industry 4.0. To a handful of manufacturers, the coming age of cyber-physical systems is the inevitable next step. For most, however, these concepts are decades away from mass adoption. I advise you not to worry.

Don’t get lost in the hype.

Instead, focus on mastering Industry 3.0 concepts, more specifically - automation, to gain greater visibility and control over your manufacturing operations in the nearer term. Tackling visibility from process to product to department and eventually throughout your entire organization, will feed into and support your ultimate path to Industry 4.0.

Listen, I meet with manufacturers often and I am consistently asked how they compare to others in the industry. So during the webinar, we asked attendees a few questions about the state of their manufacturing operations. Below is the Q&A we conducted.

How close are you to adopting Industry 4.0?
Doing it now	36%
Plan to start in 2015	21%
It's in our five year plan	21%
We haven't even thought about it	21%

Do you spend at least an hour a day searching for assets or products?
Yes	79%
No	21%

How many variations of a product do you build on a single line?
One	0%
Tens	38%
Hundreds	31%
Thousands	31%

What is the main cause of manual errors in your plant?
People	60%
Process	40%

What percentage of wireless tools do you have in your plant?
0-10%	46%
11-20%	31%
21-50%	23%
51% and up	0%

Interestingly enough, the results collected during this webinar are in line with the survey we conducted over the summer that reflects answers from more than 250 manufacturers. So what does this tell us? Many things really, but fundamentally – manufacturers need more visibility so they can improve productivity, efficiency, and their bottom line.

How can manufacturers gain more visibility? During the webinar, I outlined a few steps to consider:

Be Selfish – Start small and local. Pick a pain point and tackle it. Prove to your organization and yourself that the technology you choose works.

Be Forward Thinking – Understand your next step and ultimate goal and invest in the right infrastructure from the outset.

Be Cooperative – Share your success and work with other people and departments. There are significant benefits when the entire organization invests in technology that contributes to greater visibility and control.

Be Supportive – Guide other plants through the process to help the organization prepare for the final step – Industry 4.0.

If you’d like to learn more, you can access the webinar on-demand at http://bit.ly/ZJFbwh. Of course, if you have any questions please contact me at Adrian.Jennings@ubisense.net.

The Promised Land

Written by: Adrian Jennings, CTO of real-time location intelligence solutions

When I was a budding rocket scientist playing with missiles in the wilder parts of England, it always seemed to me that my colleagues across the pond in the US had it so much better. I imagined they were better trained, better resourced and altogether lived in some kind of Promised Land. When I eventually moved to the US I’m not sure whether I was gratified or disappointed to find that they had all the same constraints and issues we faced in the UK. In fact, we had pioneered some techniques that the US was keen to learn.

I imagine it must sometimes feel the same working in a manufacturing plant and reading in the press all about cyber-connected systems, Industry 4.0 and the like. It must often feel like everyone else has better technology and better processes than you, and surely that means they are much farther ahead.

Well, just as I discovered when moving to the US: they don’t have anything better than you, and they aren’t any further ahead. Ubisense’s recent survey of smart technologies in manufacturing revealed exactly that. Whereas a few pioneers have adopted advanced manufacturing technologies, most plants still rely on mostly manual processes and have a distinct lack of operational visibility.

The results of the survey are available in a white paper, which also discusses a path to better visibility and better processes – one that doesn’t require huge technological leaps into some imagined Promised Land. Have a look at the white paper: http://bit.ly/1vpRUPm. You might be comforted to know that many others face the same problems you do. And who knows – maybe you’re the one who’s ahead?

21 Ways to Chase Waste with Smart Factory

Eliminating waste is an important part of improving your production system. The old way of chasing waste was to wait until it popped up and then chase it down. This reactive approach does not achieve meaningful improvements, and it drains your organization’s energy and resources. There is a new way to chase waste: use an indoor location tracking solution and let it tell you what you need to know before it becomes a problem. Indoor location tracking can: Notify you immediately when something unexpected occurs, such as a missed step or an incorrect process sequence. Notifications can be done by email, SMS, or visual alert. Help you find inventory that is stuck, abandoned, or misplaced so that all of your equipment is properly utilized. Identify process bottlenecks with real data to help justify change or future investments. With real-time maps, event alerts, and location information, you can find and eliminate waste efficiently and proactively!

Visualize Your Factory  Ubisense Smart Factory allows you to easily search for, identify, and find an asset in real time. We know you have goals to meet and products to produce, so we have made our solution simple and intuitive; technology should enable you, not hinder you. Let us show you how it can make your job easier, your processes more efficient, and help you achieve your goal of eliminating waste.

Selecting a Location Intelligent System: Accuracy & Tag Range

When evaluating the suitability of various location intelligent solutions, it is useful to have some technical understanding. In the following blog post we will discuss how location accuracy and tag range play an important part in choosing a location intelligent system. 

LOCATION ACCURACY AND LOCATION CONSISTENCY

Location based applications are most often compared in terms of the accuracy provided by the sensor system. Location accuracy is certainly a critical parameter for quantifying system performance, but when quoted out of context it can prove misleading. A location sensor system is only fully defined when location accuracy is quoted in conjunction with a consistency metric.

Consistency in this context means a measure of how often the location system delivers the stated accuracy. The game of darts provides a simple example: even the most amateur player can score a bulls-eye if enough darts are thrown, but the measure of a good player is: how often can he or she hit the bulls-eye?

Figure 4-1 (above) shows an example of the output of a typical location system (or, the places where the dart hit the board in the above analogy).

This plot is generated by counting the number of measurements that lie within the error circles shown in Figure 4-1. In this example, 20% of the measurements lie within the 3’ error circle, 70% are within the 15’ circle (including those in the 3’ circle) and 97% are inside the 30’ circle. Figure 4-2 shows that data plotted in blue. The orange line shows an example location system with a much tighter constellation of measurements around the true location, with 95% of measurements inside the 3’ error circle.

The blue and orange lines in Figure 4-2 represent a true comparison between location technologies. By simply comparing location accuracy, misleading results can be interpreted if the accuracy figures are quoted at different consistency levels. In the darts analogy, the orange line represents a good player, and the blue line a poor one.

Figure 4-3 shows how consistency levels become important in location enabled applications. In this figure seven zones are shown, with the item being tracked located in the center zone. In the case of a 3’ error measurement the item is correctly associated with the center zone. When the error is 15’ the item could be in one of three zones, and with 30’ error in one of five.

Reading from Figure 4-2 the different location systems can now be fully compared as shown in Table 4-1.

The importance of Table 4-1 is that it compares systems based on not just how well they perform, but how often they perform to that level. It’s clear that both systems can claim to identify the location of a tag to within a single zone, but that the high accuracy system does so with significantly more consistency than the low accuracy system. In a real production environment, location system performance must exceed 99.9% for many mission critical applications.

OVERVIEW OF LOCATION TECHNIQUES

All location intelligence technologies share the common theme of some kind of tag attached to the object being tracked, and an infrastructure of sensors that determine the ID and location of the tag. Such tags may emit optical, ultrasonic or radio frequency energy, but radio frequency (RF) tags are the only ones suited to industrial environments (since optical and ultrasonic signals are too easily jammed or blocked in typical factories).

In all cases the sensing infrastructure attempts to measure either the range or bearing (or both) to a tag from one or more sensors and from that information the tag’s location is calculated. The technologies are predominantly differentiated buy how well they are able to measure range and/or bearing and, as a result, how accurately they are able to determine tag location.

MEASURING SIGNAL STRENGTH

Many location systems make use of the fact that the signal strength from a tag becomes weaker as the tag moves farther from a sensor. These systems measure the signal strength measured by multiple sensors, use that information to estimate the range of the tag from each sensor and then calculate the tag location. Figure 4-4 shows how this works.

In Figure 4-4 it is clear that three sensors are required in order to locate a tag in two dimensions. (By extension, four sensors are required for a 3D location determination.)

Tag location errors are cause by many sources, the dominant of which being variations in signal strength caused by effects other than range. If some other effect acts to reduce the signal strength then the sensor interprets this weak signal as longer range than reality. Figure 4-5 shows how range errors from each sensor contribute to overall tag location error.

Range errors are the limiting factor of signal strength systems since many factors affect signal strength beyond just the spacing of the tag from the sensor. Examples include attenuation due to signal blockage and variations due to tag orientation. The dominant factor, however, is an effect called “multipath” which is a factor in all location system types, and so is worth a short aside to aid in understanding.

When a tag emits a signal, that signal is, by design, emitted in all directions so as to reach as many sensors as possible. This scattergun signal will bounce off any reflective surface, such as metal objects, and a single sensor may hear the signal from one tag echoing off multiple surfaces. The effect is exactly the same as voice echoes heard when shouting in a large cavern or in the mountains.

In a manufacturing environment, which is filled with metallic objects, the chief concern of location systems is to cope with the damaging effects of multipath. For signal strength systems multipath can be very damaging indeed due to an effect known as signal cancellation.

A radio wave is just like a wave on the ocean: an undulating surface which moves along at a certain speed (the speed of light in the case of radio waves). In the ocean, waves can come from multiple directions and when two peaks meet a very large wave can build up locally as the peaks add together. Similarly a peak from one direction can coincide with a trough from another direction and these completely cancel each other leaving no wave at all. The phenomenon is familiar to surfers who understand that waves come in sets: they wait through the periods when the peaks and troughs are cancelling each other leaving very small waves, instead hoping to catch a period of peaks combining with peaks for the biggest surf of the set.

The exact same signal cancellation phenomenon affects radio waves as they bounce off multiple reflectors and arrive at a sensor from many directions. The adding and cancelling of peaks and troughs look to the sensor like increases and decreases in signal strength, which that sensor interprets as decreases and increases in tag range even though the tag may not be moving at all. The result is that the error bands in Figure 4-5 can grow very wide due to multipath, causing large errors in tag location.

The Golden Rule: Better Visibility = Better Process

Without Ubisense you can't see the entire picture....

Visibility is a critical component in any task that involves motion. Humans rely on their sense of sight, sound, touch and even smell in order to identify and locate objects around them, and in doing so safely and efficiently complete execute tasks involving intricate motion. The seemingly simple task of walking through a crowded shopping mall requires detailed knowledge of the position, nature and motion of all objects in that environment lest we expect a wall to move out of our way, or needlessly dodge a person whose path does not in fact cross ours.

But with Ubisense you can see exactly where everything is in real time. 

Any manufacturing process is similarly a complex task involving intricate motion: parts and sub-assemblies move from suppliers to assembly facilities; items under construction move from workstation to workstation; tools, parts and workers must assemble at the right place at the right time. The list goes on and on.

In any such environment the scope for mistakes and inefficiencies is prevalent: parts delivered to the wrong place, the incorrect tools used, bottlenecks impeding progress, items lost. In just the same way that human senses provide real-time information about the environment enabling informed judgments to be made and efficient progress to follow, location intelligent systems provide visibility into manufacturing processes and give operators the visibility and control needed to optimize efficiency and eliminate mistakes.



Automotive Supply Chain Magazine Article

Find & Seek

If you're looking to turn your manufacturing facility into a Smart Factory then real-time location system (RTLS) technology can help. Laura King reports. 

The world of time and location-based data is growing at a staggering pace and its place in the automotive production line is pushing that evolution. The practise of increasing efficiency, cutting seconds, and increasing productivity has always been at the core of the automotive industry and Cambridge - based Ubisense has plenty of experience in assisting OEMs. The inspiration for their latest system came from the BMW assembly line in Regensburg and has now been rolled out in various production facilities across the globe, including BMW in China and the USA, MINI in the UK, Daimler in Germany, and Smart in France. Working closely with Atlas Copco – the Swedish industrial tooling and equipment business – Ubisense has produced smart tools which do the leg-work for you.

The first installation came at the BMW Regensburg plant, which produces the 1 Series, 3 Series and Z4 sports cars on the same line. The production planning system processes the customer orders and sends the customer-specific vehicle request onto the line. To utilise tools and set torques many plants use a passive RFID system or a barcode and scanner, which can be unreliable and labour-intensive. Ubisense CEO Richard Green highlights the problems the OEM was finding saying, “the operator has to pick up a scanner, scan the barcode that’s attached to a car, put the barcode scanner down, then work on the car that he’s just scanned – but occasionally the operator might get distracted, take a mobile phone call, and then go to work on the next car on the line. Of course he’s scanned the wrong car for the settings for the tool.”

“They were getting a lot of misreads of barcode scanning and so they wanted to eliminate that activity. So, as we tag the car and the tool, we eliminate that activity for the operator. That saves time but, more importantly, it really error-proofs the whole system. The operator simply has to walk up to the car with the tool and the tool is then programmed for the car on which he’s operating.”

“It’s very common – particularly with the new generation of wireless tools that most manufacturers are introducing – that the operators want to work forward; they can fool the system by working up the line and creating themselves a time buffer. That’s a pretty dangerous activity if you’re not changing the settings on the tool for the car that you’re going to go and work on but, if you have Ubisense installed, then it’s impossible for the operators to have the wrong tool with the wrong setting on the wrong car.”

Ubisense uses advanced ultra wideband (UWB) radio to locate and track small tags. As Ubisense removes the act of scanning a barcode, and the risk of faulty scanning, it can save as much as six seconds for each tool. On a line with over 140 tools this can mean gaining 14 minutes for every vehicle. This level of accuracy in geospatial awareness – the sensors can track a tool to within twelve inches in three dimensions many times a second – and reliability of data is almost totally unique to Ubisense and goes some way to explaining their global popularity, even having small installations in Honda and Toyota plants. Their work with Atlas Copco introduces them to the plant, and they then work hard to build relationships with OEMs, to provide upgrades to software and operating systems when needed.

Adding the tracking system and database to a factory is outwardly easy according to Green. He points out that on a final assembly line “work and cable trays would probably be running along the lines anyway for the forms of equipment”. This means Ubisense can simply “run our cabling into existing infrastructure and put up our network of readers along the line”. On something like the MINI production line, which is roughly two kilometres long, there will need to be between 350 and 400 sensor readers depending on the level of precision and performance reliability needed for a particular area. The actual installation time can be achieved in a manner of days; weeks if the area is bigger or the process more complicated.

“We have some fairly sophisticated tools for simulating a plant, quite early on in the process. Given the plant’s dimensional data we can model against that and simulate what the systems will look like and how they will interact. We can use that intimate early design workshop with the customers to make sure that they understand the kind of thing we can do, the inputs we need and the outputs we can give. I think we’ve got some fairly comprehensive tools but it’s still a fairly involved process, with the manufacturing engineers and often the systems people.

“Fairly early in the engagement, we would be working with the IT groups and they’re always satisfied with safety measures. There’s always an internal checklist for IT on network, security, wireless standards, interference and all those topics. They’re incredibly careful about those things and very early on in the process we’ll go through that discussion and I don’t think we’ve ever had a problem.”

Currently Ubisense offers an Assembly Control System, ‘Asset Manager’, among others, and ‘Ubisense VIP’ – a bonus package offering web-based user configuration, support for multiple-site operation and management of multiple components and multiple tags per component – as part of their sentient computing Smart Factory System. The company has developed this suite of applications by working closely with their strategic customers, who continue to stretch Ubisense into other areas of their business, as they see having one common location and identification system as being absolutely critical. Green mentions that this will be expanded in the future saying, “we have a whole road-map of things coming along, really driven by our strategic customers. That’s everything from tool locations, tracking at the beginning and into assembly control – quite a lot of activity in off-tracks and then into the yard – so we can genuinely put together an end-to-end system for the customer with a minimal number of systems to track and identify products and assets and make them visible and control them throughout the whole manufacturing process.”

The current systems require a lot of investment, but the return is a direct productivity benefit in reducing the amount of time it would otherwise take to identify the car and the tool. The tangible ROI can be labelled at about 12 months and with multiple applications this can be shortened. There is very well-defined, detailed ROI that Ubisense can plug into the parameters – the tools and the station’s stack time, output of the cars and so on – to illustrate the benefits of a compound ROI.

“We’ve got something that is genuinely helping companies to be more productive and I think that’s a key driver in today’s market. Anything that can help improve the productivity of a manufacturing plant gets an airing and to have secured some of Europe’s leading manufacturers – and a global agreement with BMW to roll it out across all their plants – is a testimony to the return on investment that they see.

“Any benefits of this sort of system are additive or cumulative. At a high level, the general benefit is giving operational management – visibility and control. That can be simply knowing where assets are, knowing where products are, knowing where major component assemblies are, as they’re going along a line. Then, using the knowledge of that location to drive process automation, establishing the setting of a torque on a torque tool, or the setting on a rolling road for a particular VIN number. They’re both making the activity visible and then being able to control it. And then, of course, being able to collect that data means that afterwards you can analyse it and look at ways of improving the process. That’s a huge additional benefit you get as a consequence of providing that visibility and control.”

Green (pictured) has been with Ubisense since its inception in 2002 in an industrial lab in Cambridge headed by Chairman and President of the Institute of Engineers and Technology, Professor Andy Hopper CBE. During his twenty years of experience in the software industry, as a founder of Smallworld which was listed on Nasdaq in 1996 and was acquired by GE in 2000, he’s seen a lot of commercial opportunities. Ubisense continues to multiply, serving the aerospace business and expanding into industrial vehicles, from Cotton Harvester assembly at John Deere to hydraulic technology in industrial vehicles with Caterpillar and tier suppliers – notably providing a 98% reduction in manual search efforts in the repair area at the Jamestown, New York Cummins plant. The end product may vary greatly but the connections and software are easily adapted.

“The basic infrastructure is the same and also the basic software. Of course, the quantities, volumes and throughputs are quite significantly different. Although we find extremes in automotive – at one end we’ve got MINI producing a thousand cars a day and at the other end we’ve got Aston Martin producing 20 – that’s quite a significant variation. Then you go into aerospace and Airbus is producing one plane a month. It is a different scale; essentially they’re doing the same thing but it’s a more complex assembly. One of the huge benefits of getting a system like this installed is that it really helps with flexibility within the manufacturing activity. Whether it’s aerospace – and that ranges from an Airbus to a fighter jet to a helicopter – or tractors, this technology can be applied to any relatively high-value product and its manufacturing process.”

The system has the ability to show when a person or object with an assigned tag enters an area, automatically locate it, show it in the Ubisense 3D environment and pass the data through to the Ubisense API and to other systems such as After Action Review (AAR) camera tracking. The only challenge Ubisense finds in inplementing systems, says Green, is integrating with the existing systems because “the OEMs have an awful lot of home-grown systems and middleware. When we began working with BMW we had to integrate with its particular middleware. Daimler has another set and Volkswagen another. Once connected the suite quickly becomes indispensable.
“In terms of giving people visibility over the supply chain, it can be an enormous help in helping to adjust according to new circumstances.”

In short, the ability to locate and track containers, tools and vehicles on a production line in three dimensions can provide a flawless line, cuts in assembly time and practical usable data to build on in the future. A system that creates a multi-dimensional data image of a factory and can spot errors is only the latest in sentient computing. Advances in mapping technology, physical tagging and geospatial software are still possible. No point waiting for them though, the current systems are already performing miracles.
Return

 http://www.automotivesupplychain.org/features/204/62/Find-and-seek/

Hyundai Kia Expand Deployment of Ubisense Solution

Cambridge, UK – Ubisense Group Plc (“Ubisense” or the “Company”) (LSE:UBI), the real time, location based lean manufacturing solutions company, is pleased to announce the expansion of its installation with Hyundai Kia in Asia.

This phase two expansion follows the success of the pilot installation deployed just two months ago to their assembly line manufacturing plant in South Korea.

Richard Green, Ubisense Chief Executive Officer, said that Hyundai’s decision to increase its RTLS installation reinforces their previous deployment decision and emphasizes growing traction Ubisense’s solution is receiving around the world.

“We took the decision to expand into the Asia Pacific region to focus initially on the automotive industry, within which South Korea represents a significant opportunity. We are therefore particularly pleased to strengthen our relationship with Hyundai Kia further,” Mr Green said.

“Ubisense now supplies RTLS products and solutions to eight of the top fifteen automotive manufacturers globally. Hyundai Kia is a great example of the way in which our customers start using our products, subsequently rapidly request further coverage across the original plant, and then to the rest of their plants globally. By building such close relationships, we continue to innovate and increase the value we add to our customers over the long term.”

Ubisense’s RTLS solution is already deployed under a global license agreement with BMW and installed in their plants across Europe, Asia and North America.