Location: 94227 Zwiesel, Germany · Industry: Plastics processing, automotive, interior, injection moulding · Products: Automotive interior parts, plastic components, injection moulded parts and safety-relevant components · ERP: — · Website: https://www.intevaproducts.com · S4P modules: KraussMaffei Easytrace powered by 4SPC
Initial situation
For the manufacture of safety-relevant components such as airbag deployment channels, automotive OEMs require gap-free traceability across all process steps. End-to-end traceability meeting the strict requirements of the automotive industry was only partially achievable with the means previously available. Production at IAC Group at the Zwiesel site, with around 50 employees, encompasses the manufacture of automotive interior parts and plastic components where every production step must be unambiguously documented and assigned to the respective part.
Challenge
The high quality and documentation requirements of the automotive industry demanded gap-free capture and tracking of every individual part. Without end-to-end digital traceability, the requirements for traceability and documentation were difficult to meet. A particular challenge was cross-machine capture: not only the in-house injection moulding machines but also upstream processes such as helium testing and marking had to be integrated into a unified traceability chain. Auditability and traceability down to individual part level were mandatory requirements of OEM customers.
Solution
KraussMaffei Easytrace powered by 4SPC was introduced as an end-to-end traceability solution that documents all manufacturing steps gap-free and makes every part unambiguously traceable. Notably, this applies not only to KraussMaffei injection moulding machines but also to machines from Engel and Hentian. In the latter case, S4P bears full responsibility from the Human Machine Interface (HMI) through to complete process control for the production of safety-relevant parts. The data captured from injection moulding machines is made available file-based via FTP. All manufacturing steps are thus captured and documented without gaps, so that every part is unambiguously traceable.
Results and benefits
With Easytrace, Inteva at the Zwiesel site achieves gap-free traceability of all safety-relevant parts. Manufacturing steps are fully documented, IO/NIO decisions are automatically captured and every part is labelled with a unique DMC code. This ensures the highest level of quality assurance and meets the stringent requirements of the automotive industry. Audits and recall analyses can be conducted on a reliable data basis, manual documentation effort has been reduced and process reliability has been sustainably increased.