Product Quality Prediction (PQP), a new initiative joining the ranks of the <link innovation-entrepreneurship digital-industry>Digital Industry Action Line by EIT Digital, is expected to greatly improve the way quality checks are made.
In mass production lines, quality must be checked regularly to avoid malfunctioning products hitting the market. These quality checks, usually performed manually by experienced operators, are time consuming and expensive, leading to an overall reduction in productivity.
Dutch company Bright Cape is developing a data analytics tool that will examine sensor data generated by machines to assess whether the expected quality requirements are met for every single product.
This will allow factory workers to reduce the time spent on these activities and be able to work on more complex problems, resulting in improved product quality and a reduction of costs.
“Normally, quality-related costs (due to failure, prevention or maintenance activities) run in the range of 10 to 30 percent of sales or 25 to 40 percent of operating expenses. Our solution is aimed at reducing these figures, allowing companies to save money and reduce downtime,” Bright Cape founder and managing partner Serge Beniers says.
As with all EIT Digital’s supported initiatives, the PQP innovation activity will be largely based on cooperation and teamwork: the partners that will contribute to the tool’s development are Philips and Bright Cape in the Netherlands, and SICS Swedish ICT in Sweden.
Philips will provide data in terms of process measurements and quality indicators, while SICS will provide expertise, methods and best practices for data analytics applied to industrial processing data.
Thanks to available plug-ins, the PQP data analytics solution will be applicable to every type of product and production line; manufacturers from all kind of industries will be able to create better products at lower costs, gaining invaluable edge over their closest competitors.
The tool will be available on the market by the end of 2017.
