Southern Enterprise Awards 2022 | 25 Southern Enterprise Awards 20 2 | Most Innovative Technological Solutions Company - London expertise, Habber has developed the QP (Quality Predictor) together with IBM – a solution aimed for the manufacturing industry whose objective is to be able, through Artificial Intelligence, to skip steps in quality control processes that aim not only to accelerate the production time but also to reduce some manual work in the process. The main objective is to digitalise processes as much as possible. The QP is a solution for manufacturing quality controls. In a plant, there are several quality control points along the entire assembly line. In each of these checkpoints there are teams that work in shifts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to be able to carry out all the required quality tests for the entire production to guarantee that only products without manufacturing or assembly defects (who meet the quality standards) go to the market. One of these checkpoints, where we applied the QP solution at a car plant, is the road test. The road test requires each car produced to be driven by a person to check the quality of the entire assembled car. Once on the road, the tester checks if there are defects or repairs that need to be carried out or if everything is according to the quality standards. With a production in the hundreds of cars per day and an average time for this road test of 15/20 minutes per car, it is easy to see that this test greatly impacts the plant’s ability to ship the final product to the market. It is also easy to see that this road test alone requires many people involved and, to be able to acceptably handle the daily production, it is necessary to maintain continuous shifts to carry out this test 24/7 without stops. There is also the human error that can happen because it is a manual test. Considering the QP applied to the automotive industry, if we know that most of the vehicles end the assembly line with no defects, what if we could skip the road test on some cases? With the QP solution, before the control point where the road test starts, each vehicle is given a score according to the probability of being well assembled and without defects. This means it’s the probability of that car passing the road test without any issues. Having this indicator, a manager can confidently decide which vehicles may not carry out the road test, bypassing it in the production process. This solution, applied to several cars in the daily production, brings great advantages: - reduces production time - accelerating the time for cars to be available in the market. - reduces production’s costs. - Allows part of the workforce to be reallocated to other value-added tasks. - And it allows, due to the decreased production time, for the plant to increase the daily production, thus increasing revenues. Considering the example for a car manufacturing business there are countless gains made with the Quality Predictor. Below you can see some illustrative numbers of what the gains could be having this solution implemented in a plant: It must be said that, due to the enormous success obtained, there are already several other plants wanting to apply the same solution in their assembly lines. Besides the road test, the QP has countless applications within manufacturing processes. For more information, feel free to reach out: habber.com Company: Habber Tec UK Ltd Contact: Manuel Sousa
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