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Recent years have greatly accelerated the automation and digitization of processes especially in companies in the manufacturing industry. Ensuring the highest quality products while reducing inspection times is becoming crucial to remain competitive in the global market.
For the Hutchinson Group, a global leader in transportation solutions, reliable quality control has been a priority in maintaining manufacturing standards. Our company was honored to partner with Hutchinson Group in the transformation of their analog quality control process to a fully automated, digital system based on vision-based product verification.
The Hutchinson Group is a global leader with more than 160 years of success and innovation. The company has gained an international reputation by supplying key products such as car and bicycle tires, as well as accessories for the first airplanes and airships. The development of plastics has allowed the company to make further technological breakthroughs, and today the Hutchinson Group provides intelligent solutions for land, sea, air and space transportation.
Hutchinson Group's European factories, which specialize in seals for the automotive industry, faced the need to modernize their quality control process. The previous analog quality monitoring system was time-consuming, manual and inefficient - requiring manual monitoring of machines, recording of data and manual reporting of results. This process led to many errors, and managers had to enter results from paper cards into an Excel system, which was labor-intensive, further increasing the risk of mistakes. With each error, the risk of production delays and potential financial losses due to defective products that could reach customers increased.
Hutchinson Group therefore needed an advanced solution in line with Industry 4.0 that would automate the entire quality control process, eliminating the need for manual data entry and minimizing the risk of human error. It was crucial to create a system that would provide real-time, detailed data on work at individual stations, enabling managers to immediately monitor production efficiency and respond quickly to any problems. By integrating with digital production management processes, the new system was also expected to support more precise planning and optimization of operations, resulting in improved overall factory efficiency and higher product quality.
The main challenge was to develop a digital system for measuring and reporting production quality indicators that would fully automate the process of inspecting the first parts produced. To date, manually inspecting each first part was inefficient and error-prone, so a key requirement was to implement vision-based analysis that could accurately and automatically verify that the first production part met certain specifications.
To this end, we designed a system based on a camera and Raspberry Pi to capture an image of a manufactured part and compare it with stored patterns. When a shift begins, the operator scans the production label and then places the first manufactured part on the vision table, where the camera performs a visual analysis. The system compares the part image with a predefined pattern and automatically generates a result: conformance (OK) or non-conformance (NOK).
In addition to the analysis itself, the project also required the results to be uploaded to a central database to ensure archiving and enable full reporting. The data had to include details of the part's reference, date of manufacture and the job number from which the reading came. In the event of a positive result, the operator received a message on the screen, while in the event of an error, a message was displayed alerting the operator to contact the leader. This approach was designed to minimize human error and speed up response to potential quality problems.
As part of the implementation of this project, we created a state-of-the-art automated quality control system, built on a foundation of Azure, .NET and Angular technologies.
The system was designed to automatically organize and send data to production management, allowing managers to monitor factory performance in real time.
With the solutions implemented, the quality control process has been automated and reduced by more than 90%. Manual first-part analysis time has been reduced to a minimum, and operators can now enter results with a single touch on tablets integrated into the system. Production data is automatically organized and reported to managers in real time.
As a result, Hutchinson has gained a state-of-the-art tool that allows it to monitor production processes more effectively and respond quickly to potential quality problems. The customer's enthusiastic response to our solution has led us to collaborate on the further development of the system, which is currently being implemented in more Hutchinson factories.
Cooperation with the Hutchinson Group has allowed us to demonstrate our skills in modern industrial process automation. Thanks to our proprietary system, we have managed not only to increase production efficiency, but also to provide the customer with tools for better monitoring and quality management at the factory level. The implementation of Industry 4.0 in Hutchinson Group's factories represents another step into the future of digital production management.
Izabela is a Project Manager and Scrum Master with 6 years of experience in the IT industry. She has experience in leading diverse projects and effectively managing teams. She's a leader with the ability to create cohesive and efficient teams based on Scrum values. Regardless of the project's scale, she's able to establish a dynamic environment where collaboration, innovation, and delivering valuable products take precedence.
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