Sustainability in production: How smart technologies help to make the shop floor greener

The topic of sustainability is no longer a foreign word in the corporate world. When it comes to positioning themselves successfully on the market in the long term, companies are quickly confronted with the issue these days. The introduction of smart technologies in production can offer significant added value for manufacturing companies.

Definition: sustainable production

The term sustainable production describes the creation of products using economically viable processes that minimize negative environmental impacts while conserving energy and natural resources.

Industrial production also plays a major role here. Due to the high consumption of resources and the global value chains, it contributes a significant share to environmental pollution.

In order to counteract the increasing noticeable burden, the aim in production is to reduce energy consumption, cut emissions and, above all, minimize rejects.

These three factors are the basic building blocks for making the industry more sustainable in the long term and thus reducing its environmental impact.

In the following, you will learn how smart technologies can be used to sustainably optimize the shop floor.

Implementation: sustainable production

Automation of production can make a significant contribution to sustainability in many respects. By integrating intelligent collaboration solutions, resources can be saved and rejects on the shop floor can be reduced, which supports a continual improvement process.

But which technologies are target-oriented when it comes to increasing sustainable production?

One intelligent solution is the use of smart wearables on the shop floor. They not only enable human-machine connection, but also support the communication between employees in production.

With the help of smart wearables such as smart watches, data can be documented simply by clicking or scanning. The advantage of this is that reaction times, process flows and material stocks can be easily measured in order to visualize where resources and energy can be saved in production.

In addition, smart wearables offer the opportunity to optimize production with the help of digital technologies. This optimization can be achieved, for example, by shortening response times. Smart wearables offer the possibility of transmitting error messages from a machine quickly and specifically to the right employee.

Real-time transmission of machine fault messages leads to a reduction in downtime by enabling production staff to respond quickly to the problem. By quickly detecting machine malfunctions, downtime and quality problems can be efficiently minimized in the long term, drastically reducing energy waste and scrap.

By integrating smart technologies, transport routes of, for example, new material procurement can be saved and consequently reduce energy consumption in the production. Simplified and more efficient planning of inventories with the help of intelligent software can drastically reduce CO2 emissions and thus increase the sustainability factor of production.

Furthermore, the possibility of directly documenting work processes with the help of smart wearables can quickly filter out what causes rejects and how they can be minimized. This documentation function reduces the waste of resources through the efficient planning of material requirements.

Sustainable production with the help of the aucobo system

The integrated communication function of the aucobo solution enables production employees to coordinate themselves and therefor saves long, time-consuming and stressful communication channels. Tasks and workflows can be assigned, accepted and forwarded with a simple click on the smart wearables. This promotes the reduction of resources which is fundamental to sustainability.

Our smart shop floor solution from aucobo decentralizes the communication on the shop floor and delivers the right information to the right place at the right time. By implementing our software in conjunction with smart wearables, we make it possible to increase machine utilization in the production significantly.

Increasing machine utilization in production is the result of reducing machine downtime. These occur mainly due to delayed reaction times, lack of material or due to a lack of employees when they have to operate several machines at the same time. Exactly these problems can be eliminated with the help of our aucobo solution.

By reporting the machine malfunction directly to the smartwatch of the production employees, they can react immediately and ensure that the malfunction is corrected as quickly as possible. The same applies to the notification of material shortages – with the help of the aucobo solution, employees are notified directly about a material shortage and can compensate it immediately.

Those two messaging functions enable a sustainable reduction in downtime and thus avoid an inefficient wastage of resources on the shop floor.

With the help of the integrated documentation function of the aucobo solution, data can be recorded digitally in a time-saving manner and consequently the employees’ time can be organized more effectively. This also enables employees to operate multiple machines on the shop floor. Due to the automatable distribution of information and data, they can be intelligently linked, simultaneously monitored and controlled by the aucobo system.

By quickly identifying quality issues with real-time information to the right people, the aucobo solution enables an early response to machine malfunctions and can significantly minimize or, in the best case, eliminate rejects. The resulting reduction in wasted material inventory leads to an increase in sustainability across the entire shop floor.

It should be noted that with the help of our aucobo solution, the basic sustainability factors can be optimized. By using our intelligent software in combination with smart wearables, production and work processes can be easily controlled and documented digitally. This enables efficient production planning by planning and implementing processes in a resource-saving manner.

Likewise, machine downtimes can be prevented or even unnecessary downtimes reduced by using the aucobo solution. By connecting our aucobo system to the production machines, men and machine can be connected easily. The aucobo solution not only reports error messages to the employees, it also serves to record the data of the single work steps.

In summary, aucobo’s intelligent collaboration solution can optimize all fundamental factors of sustainable production thanks to its flexible usability and hardware-independent connection. As a result, resources and energy can be saved as needed, rejects can be minimized, and consequently sustainability on the shop floor can be increased.

Would you also like to make your production greener and contribute your share to a sustainable industrial future? Feel free to make an appointment for an initial exchange!

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