Customer Success Story
Faster Quality Inspection of Incoming Goods with Twyn
Agricultural machinery manufacturer Krone belongs to one of the pioneers to use Twyn for over a year now on a daily basis. Learn how they use Twyn and what they have to say about it.
“Twyn has expanded our range of inspection systems and made inspections more flexible. Because it allows us to inspect parts for deviations more quickly, we can now inspect more parts in the same time, and decide on a case-by-case basis whether to move into a detailed inspection with significantly more time-consuming procedures.”
— Andreas Audick, Quality Engineer at Krone Agricultural Machinery
Overview
BUSINESS NEEDS
- Keeping production flowing without disruption caused by divergent items
- decrease inspection times for simple parts to save time in favour of complex parts
- Lowering risk of consecutive errors and down times at later points in production (by covering more pieces through increased inspection rates and random checks)
- Reducing times needed to setup inspection- or measurement systems
- Minimize hardware and personnel costs associated with inspections
CHALLENGES
- Ensuring high quality of incoming items to avoid errors and down times during assembly
- Changing existing workflows to reduce inefficient and error-prone quality checks due to bare manually performed inspections
- Speeding-up quality control with an overall more digitalised process
- avoiding use of elaborated, but inflexible 3D measuring processes too early in the process
- reduce setup times in the inspection process, to be able to inspect more pieces
SOLUTION & RESULTS
- During the pilot phase, Twyn enabled Krone to perform individual inspection cases much faster than before.
- Saving time in the process enabled to increase inspection rates.
- More flexible + mobile: inspections can now be carried out faster, directly on the spot, at different locations.
- With reduced inspection times and increased rates, initial calculations show Twyn was able to almost halve inspections costs of individual inspections (compared to costs incurred if Twyn was not used).
- Twyn enabled Krone to double the scope of quality control for incoming goods for inspection cases, and partly to increase it by almost a factor of 3 (compared to before Twyn).
- Using CAD and 3D models, setup of inspection cases was managed in a matter of minutes, not hours anymore.
- With object tracking and AR, Twyn enabled to fetch deviations between target & actual of manufactured items more quickly, pointing them out almost instantly.
- with no further pre-preparation required, inspections are carried out faster at higher inspection rates to cover more items.
- all-digital, instant documentation increased traceability, enabled quicker reporting for sharing insights internally or with suppliers.
Story
How AR with Twyn Enabled to Save Time & Money
Fasten the Process without Loosing Quality
As an early pilot customer, Krone’s quality engineers tested Twyn especially for incoming goods and in quality audits.
Particularly in the case of the second, things typically start with some question marks for Krone’s QA engineers. It’s clear that there’s an issue at hand, but it’s now up to them to find the root of the problem. A tense situation, where performance is crucial. Here, Twyn helped to save time, and revealed what would have slipped through even trained eyes.
After getting to now the software platform, engineers used it to inspect the batch of balers. It turned out that a bolt was misplaced, which led to the flaps not being able to close completely, due to a construction with too little leeway in some cases.
Augmented Visual Inspections to find deviations faster & more efficient
Augmented Reality reveals what’s usually hidden in plain sight: the offset of sometimes inclined substructures becomes immediately visible, when comparing the baler’s as-is against its CAD specification in augmented reality.
Visual augmented reality techniques and the auto-detection of the baler’s inspected elements made error localisation much faster and easier, while featuring precise results. A digital-by-design process made reporting simple and quick, and shortened the feedback loop between production & design, which enabled to apply changes at the root of the problem immediately.
Thanks to Twyn, Krone not only identified the falsely placed bolt more quickly than before, but also made visible the sometimes inclined position of an entire substructure, which from time to time led to not too serious problems, but all too often caused trouble in further assembly.
Understanding AR’s Potential For Day-to-Day Use
At Krone, AR’s great potential for industrial use was know for some time now. With AR enabling a seamless overlay of information and 3D constructions in the context of the real environment, those responsible saw many opportunities, especially for visual inspection tasks in quality control and service assistance.
Initially, however, Krone was not sure about the possibilities and benefits for specific, industrial use in the context of their production and quality processes. Nor were engineering sure about the effort required to put the technology into operation at the plant.
Challenges of Lean Production & Quality Control
The globally active agricultural machinery manufacturer is considered a “hidden champion” in parts of its industry and, like many others, faces the challenges of a fast, individualising production landscape with a large number of product variants, in some cases with comparatively small production series.
In particular, this poses challenges for quality assurance with its current solutions, combined with the search for systems that are more efficient, more flexible and less time-consuming to use.
Enhancing Visual Inspection – With Digital Twins
As a mobile augmented reality platform for quality inspection, Twyn uses digital twins to make deviations between target & actual of manufactured items directly visible. In doing so, it enables to augment and match a reality captured item against its CAD specification. Even better: deviations get automatically highlighted by an auto-detection, if desired.
What’s more, Twyn can be used off the shelf on a daily basis, with a minimal effort to setup AR-based inspections. Something, which was important for Krone. While team leaders were eager to help assess and improve Twyn on many levels, it is the less (high-)tech experienced personell, which is using the platform in their daily routines. Their goal is to ensure quality, not to become an expert in the field of AR.
How Twyn Convinced
After some research, Krone quickly became aware of Visometry as an AR technology- and solution provider, and Twyn in particular.
“It was the system’s simplicity in use that convinced us”, recalls Andreas Audick, quality engineer at Krone. “The ease of using Twyn and AR without much integration effort and knowledge is impressive. Regardless of whether large or small objects, individual parts or assemblies: the range in use is promising for us”.
Today, Twyn is used on a daily basis to ensure the quality of incoming goods, It extends the toolset of inspection techniques Krone can rely on: ” […] we can now inspect more parts in the same time, and decide on a case-by-case basis whether to move into a detailed inspection with significantly more time-consuming procedures.” says Audick.
“What really impressed us was that with augmented reality-enhanced inspections, we were able to work much faster than before, especially the time it took to prepare for an actual inspection was greatly decreased. There is a huge potential.”
— A. Audick
