CompositesWorld
Issue link: https://cw.epubxp.com/i/930524
An excerpt from the CW Talks interview with Avner Ben-Bassat about making a big difference using Big Data, plus CW's report on December's info-rich Carbon Fiber conference, and news of another supersonic aircraft, this time in the business jet sector. FEBRUARY 2018 16 CompositesWorld TRENDS Q&A;: Avner Ben-Bassat, president and CEO, Plataine Technologies the freezer and the part will go on to the autoclave or beyond. But the other thing that happened is that the part inherited a lot of the parents' DNA. It inherited the material number, the batch number, the remaining shelf life. …. And we have captured all of that history. …. The implications for quality and operations are huge. …. Let's say that you're in production and suddenly a part fails a quality check, and you run it to the lab and you realize that it had used a bad batch of material. So, now you need to disqualify the part, but what you also need to do is find all the other parts that had used the same material. So, you need to go back and find the source of material and then find all the other children of that material. In today's environment, this can take hours or days. The bigger problem is that during these days, you continue making bad parts. …. And the worst is that at the end of all that, you're not sure you found everything. In our world, with a real digital thread, it's a done deal in a matter of seconds. …. So, this is a very powerful data structure. CW: How does automation fit in with the digital thread and your software? ABB: I would say the industry today, and certainly the leaders, understand that they must automate and they must digitize to stay competitive, to grow or to simply meet rate. …. Automation is really the only path forward. …. But nobody is buying anything because it's cool. We see some amazingly cool robotics, and I think our stuff is cool. … We are engaged with our customers in a very professional, very technical, very practical discussion to evaluate the technology, to evaluate the software, to evaluate the benefits. …. It's not technology for technol- ogy, but technology for value. So, why do you auto- mate? Because, you want higher throughput, because you want better control of quality, because you want to reduce scrap. CW: How does your software collect data and how is it used? ABB: A lot of companies collect data, which is very intuitive and makes sense. But the key is, what do you do with the data? We look at this from a practical, problem- centric point of view. …. We want to know what is actually happening. Here, we use sensors, to tell us what is going on, where are the materials, where are the parts, what's their condition, what's the situation? And we get data off machines as well. …. And yes, some of the data needs to be received from the operators, so we give them an appli- cation. But the point is that the data is digital data. If it is on paper, it really is useless for us. So, we want data, want data in digital format and we want data in real time. Now, once we have the data, we want to put it in context, and context is fundamentally the key here. If we're tracking a material and material number one is at station number two, is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? It's great if it's supposed to be there, but it's horrible if it needs to be in the freezer because it's about to expire. So, for example, we can raise an alert and I can tell you that material 123 is going to expire. It's prepreg, it has 20 hours to live, and I will tell you that it's going to expire. … But what if tell you that you have a problem, or about to have a problem, but what if I also tell you the solution?. …. So there is a major leap here — a revolution — of how we can run the produc- tion floor by digitizing the process and then elevating it to helping production floor staff make better decisions. CW: You are creating a digital thread, are you not? ABB: A digital thread, in plain language, is the history of the making of the part. … As we move down the produc- tion line, we are capturing that information. We use a lot the parent-child analogy. The materials are the parents and the part is the child. When this child is born, two very important things happen. One, we have a new entity to track and optimize, because the materials will go back in Editor's note: As composites move increasingly into higher volume, automated manu- facturing environments, the need for good process and data control also increases. CW Talks: The Composites Podcast offered its forum to Ben-Bassat, who spoke about Industry 4.0, the digital thread and how to get started managing, and making sense of, manufacturing data. Excerpts follow. To listen to the entire conversation, search for CW Talks on iTunes or Google Play, or visit www.compositesworld.com/podcast. Source | Plataine Technologies