The Quality Mark over Factory Interconnection

Pushed also (but not only) by the possibility of getting the tax incentives provided by the Industry 4.0 Plan, the Italian branch of IHI Charging Systems International (ICSI) and Samac have further developed their long and fruitful collaboration. An assembly machine for two different types of turbochargers was built and certified by IMQ as compliant with the requirements of the hyper-depreciation by 250%. This is quite an important step forward towards an increasingly digitalized production.

di Fabrizio Dalle Nogare

“At the end of the activity carried out, it can be established that the asset being valued is included in the list of assets subject to hyper-depreciation mentioned in Attachment A of Law 232/2016”. To get to these few, cold red-tape lines – mentioned in the report released by IMQ (progressive number: 001/2018) to certify the compliance of the assembly line built by Samac for the Verderio plant of ICSI – quite a complex and thorough work was carried out, in full synergy, by two companies that share a well-established partnership.
We are talking about the Italian branch of IHI Charging Systems International, a multinational company that produces turbochargers for some of the major global car manufacturers, and Samac, a company from nearby Brescia that has been building special assembly and testing machines since 1975. Samac doubled its production area in 2018.

Searching for the right interpretation
“Last year we hit the peak out of production, with more than 1,900,000 turbochargers built”, says ICSI Industrial Officer, Lorenzo Campo. “We were asked to manufacture two new models of turbochargers, one with a pneumatic actuator and one with an electric actuator, so we turned to Samac for designing and building a new line that was not only capable to assemble both types of product but also compliant with the requirements of the Industry 4.0 Plan. Before that, however, we asked ourselves what was the technological level of our plants and, with the support of a specialized consulting firm, Cobest, we carried out a gap analysis that classified our company as already very close to the concepts of the digital factory”.
In the following few months, ICSI and Samac worked together searching for the right interpretation of a law – the one that regulates the so-called Industry 4.0 Plan – perhaps thought more for machine tools rather than for assembly lines.
Two of the seven specifications highlighted by the law, in particular, required considerable work during the design of the line: the interconnection of the line software with the IT management system employed by ICSI and the continuous monitoring of working conditions and process parameters through sensors, aimed at making the machine ready to adapt by herself to process changes.

A step forward towards innovation
“By definition, assembly lines perform non-continuous operations that make it more difficult to meet the requirements of adaptivity, for example”, says Christian Vaglia, Marketing Engineer at Samac. “Relying on the commitment and research that Samac has been doing as for Industry 4.0 for quite a long time, together with ICSI, we have not only succeeded in building a machine that complies with law requirements, but also, through the insertion of sensors and the possibility of fully monitoring the production stages, we went even further, laying the foundations for a real predictive maintenance of the line components”. In fact, the main goal was not to take advantage of tax benefits, but, as Lorenzo Campo confirms, “to find new solutions that would allow us to take a step forward towards innovation. We wanted to fully understand the opportunities that factory digitalization can give us for a better use of the factory as a whole. We are actually carrying out similar projects also as for some other stages of the production cycle, such as machining or post machining. Of course, without having a well-established company structure, an important know-how in hardware and software and the possibility of collaborating with a technologically advanced partner like Samac, it would have been truly difficult to achieve the goal we had set”.

Interconnection for data exchange
The “secret of success” of this project remains, however, software interconnection between the assembly line and the company IT management system. What has been done, concretely, as for such issue? “We have set some connection standards and implemented dedicated interfaces between the lines and the IT management system in order to exchange the data needed to start production (to give instructions on the code to be produced according to pre-defined quantities and sequence) and receive from the line itself directly on the IT management system data related to what, how and when has been actually produced, thus improving the physical and numerical compliance and ensuring the immediate transition to the following logistic flows”, explains Gavino Fraghì, Information Systems Manager at ICSI. “It was not an easy process, either because we had to adapt our IT management system to the new requirements, or because we had to find a solution that was sustainable and suitable for all our lines; we aimed to match in a balanced way the implementation of a thorough traceability system, so to detect a series of process and quality data (there are about 390 primitive data for each turbocharger collected by the various stations) to be processed in order to get some relevant information”.
Due to the implementation of this technology, ICSI has ensured the digital traceability of all the components that are mounted on an assembly line.

Industry 4.0? Much more than automation
On a closer look, the project that led to manufacture the assembly line now at work at the ICSI plant in Verderio is based on quite an unconventional belief: that Industry 4.0 is a very different and much broader concept than mere automation. “Factory digitalization does not change our idea about the importance of workers in the production process. On the contrary, we strongly believe that technology development makes it possible to improve manufacturing and get to a truly evolved factory, capable to support operators in their daily work rather than getting rid of them”, says Lorenzo Campo.
Playing a bit with words, but not going far away from reality, we could say that this project started from the interconnection between people to get the interconnection between production machines. “Both ICSI and Samac have spent a lot of time and devoted a lot of resources to this project, from the preliminary stages to analyse the law requirements, up to some more familiar activities, such as the design and construction of the line, a process once again shared with ICSI. We paid a special attention to key elements such as the control system or the data interface system, for example, which were indeed crucial to eventually have the line certified”.