Overview | Press | News | Careers | Success

Case Study:
Intier Automotive, Czech Republic

Transforming data into business information

Summary

Intier Automotive, the interiors company of Magna International, is an innovative leader in the development and manufacture of vehicle interior and vehicle closure components and systems for the global automotive industry.

A common problem among our automotive customer base is the lack of a Data Management Strategy. Companies spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to get data. Many companies fail to recognize the importance of the storage and management of this data, therefore resulting in multiple, and usually flat-format, files which makes data access difficult if not impossible.

Working with Advanced Measurements, Intier Automotive has benefited from centralized stored data and realized how they can do more, in less time, with fewer resources.

Details

Problem

For example: a typical arrangement is to have several test and measurement rigs writing to ASCII text files. Each file will contain the values of the test, date, test rig ID, operator ID... Usually, the only readily available data are the test values, and even this information is not easily accessible to compare with the data in other file. This information is referred as "hidden data".

Information, for example, the operator ID is "hidden data" because it is very time consuming to order the data according to this value and detect any possible trend. Usually, to group the information in a way where this "hidden data" is meaningful requires duplicating the data. For example creating a subdirectory where all the files belong to the same operator, while another subdirectory will order the data by test rig.

A usual situation of how the data is stored and accessed is displayed in the following graphic:

The goal would be to simplify data storage and retrieval. This will allow them to concentrate efforts in creating reports and data mining instead of trying to work all the differences arising from the heterogeneous data storage.

Solution

All the above problems can be avoided by careful planning and were considered by Advanced Measurements when it was approached by Intier to create a new test system from scratch. The architecture includes a database where all data will be centralized and stored. The architecture prevents a database read/write bottleneck by asynchronously committing data collected into conventional flat files. Scalability, both at the hardware and software level, has also been included into the design.

Due to the small number of test rigs the database has been designed in Access, although the upgrade to MS SQL is already planned. The structure of the database allows answering questions such as "What is the average number of defective pieces tested by operator X in test rigs N between YY1/DD1/MM1 and YY2/DD2/MM2?"

With the plant being located in the Czech Republic, and some of the control engineers in Canada, it was proposed to display the reports created from querying the database through a web browser. For the same reason the project required internationalization of the text strings. New additions of test rigs will only require the creation of a new table that will reflect the rig.

Pictures

The web interface has a password protected portal. From here you can select different reports from the different tests rigs. The user interface can easily accommodate a growing number of reports and test rigs trough the use of drop-down boxes.

back to Success Stories

Contact us today for more information!