Factory Of The Future: Turning Industry 4.0 Into Reality

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How can you, as a manufacturing company, arm yourself against the challenges of Industry 4.0? How is today’s Belgian Manufacturing Industry tackling this? 12 manufacturing companies took matters into their own hands and won the title of Factory Of The Future. This year, Provan too can once again pin the famous title on their hat and this partly thanks to Azumuta. Discover In this blog how Azumuta can also help your company within the transformation to innovative production company.

The Future of the Belgian Manufacturing Industry

Digital transformation is already what strikes the bell: more and more Flemish companies are taking the first steps towards digitalization and automation. Because it is necessary, Belgian companies have to transform in order to keep producing in a sustainable and competitive way.

If we want to keep the Flemish manufacturing industry competitive and sustainably anchored, then a transformation into ‘Factories of the Future’ is necessary. Institutions such as AgoriaSirris and FMTC therefore developed the Factory of The Future vision.

So far, a handful of companies successfully went through this process, dozens of other organizations are working on one or more transformations. In the year 2021, even more companies will take their first steps towards the digital factory, and Azumuta can lend a hand.

Supporting Operators

Industry 4.0 can be applied very broadly: to your product, your processes, your organization, your business model, etc. The transformation to Industry 4.0 is not a one-off ad hoc project. It requires a smart combination of a number of transformation processes.

One of these important transformations is supporting your operators remotely. An operator support system helps you lay a foundation in the mission to greater digitalization.

With operator support you can make sure that production managers or team leaders remotely support their employees in their tasks, for example during a training, maintenance assignment or as backing during work.

Digital support about the concrete execution of their tasks (via digital work instructions, for example) can be implemented very extensively, depending on the company.

Since operators receive full support via computers, smartphones or tablets, the possibilities are endless. This allows team leaders to monitor the actions of employees in real time. In addition to improved safety (including social distancing), Azumuta focuses on total support for:

Digital work instructions:
All work instructions, procedures and visual support that operators need are centralized in one place. And are available to the entire production team.

Audits:
Your audit process is fully digitized. Quality, maintenance, or 5s audits, you decide which type of audit takes place when.

Training & Competency Management:
You keep all knowledge central in the organization and monitor the training and skill level very closely.

Thanks to our LMS (Learning Management System), operators can be trained easily. Employees can train themselves which significantly shortens the training process.

Product Controls:
You guarantee the quality of each product with digital product checks. Production workers go through checks in a systematic way when carrying out work instructions.

Feedback on the floor:__
Have workers report improvement ideas or problems during the production process in an accessible way. Follow up issues in a structured way with our improvement boards.

Complete production tracking:__
Keep an overview of the entire factory floor and monitor production closely. Improve efficiency on the shop floor and compare historical data with real-time information.

Of course, every company is different. Only the company knows its customers and products, defines its business model and knows where its added value lies. Companies must therefore take matters into their own hands and initiate and realize transformations. Nevertheless, organizations like to get a push and be supported and encouraged during this process. AgoriaSirris and FMTC already guide a lot of companies in Flanders.

But we also like to help you take your first steps towards Industry 4.0 and optimal support of your production employees.

Provan: Azumuta Customer and Factory of the Future

How can you as a production company stay competitive in the ever-changing market like today? This is a question that more and more companies are asking themselves, including Provan. Provan is a customer of Azumuta and won the Factory of The Future trophy 3 times in a row.

Provan is a subcontractor in the metal industry, offering steel, aluminum and stainless steel parts in a one-stop-shop approach. Their specialty is welding, laser and sheet metal fabrication, profiling and assembly work. Since their inception, they have grown into a thriving company with 75 employees and an annual turnover of over 12 million euros.

This Belgian company specializes in production with high complexity and recurring production. They distinguish themselves through their unique QRM methodology and can thus shorten lead times within the production process. This allows provan to create additional time and flexibility. With the goal of allowing their customers to focus on their core business.

How does Azumuta play a role in Provan’s innovative production process? We help simplify and support the QRM process. First, operators use tablets on the factory floor to access digital work instructions. Each production employee works in Azumuta, i.e. in the same system, and receives a real-time overview of all work instructions.

Team leads can also easily check which operator is working on which order.

In addition, production staff can report improvement ideas or problems during the production process in an easily accessible way via the improvement boards. Ideas and feedback are directly linked to the correct work instructions. In this way, ideas never get lost.

They also digitize their entire audit process via the Azumuta platform. With the scheduling calendar, they choose which type of audit takes place, including recurring audits, this way they don’t miss any scheduled audits.

In summary, Provan keeps an overview of the entire factory floor and closely monitors their production. And all this with the help of the Azumuta platform.

More about our Customers?

Coming soon: Raf Kenis, Quality manager at Provan. He will explain in an interview how they apply Azumuta within their production environment. So be sure to keep an eye on our customer page for more updates!

Want to find out more? Then read the various use cases on our customer page. Or register for an online demo moment.

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