Annual Report 2020
CLASSIC PROJECT MANAGEMENT MEETS AGILITY
Teams require a certain level of maturity to work effectively and efficiently with agility. The employees in the Safety Machine Analytics project have gained this maturity – with some effort – and have even achieved pioneering work in the company. And it was worth it: The international cross-departmental and cross-functional team launched its eponymous software solution onto the market in 2020.
Safety Machine Analytics monitors and analyses safety systems on machines. The scalable software solution is a serial product available to all customers. The idea for developing the software originated after a retrofit project in the USA. The customer had their plant retrofitted, during which it was reequipped with new safety technology. The service technician installed numerous safety light curtains, safety laser scanners and safety door switches connected via a safety controller. The machinery came to a sudden stop two days after he flew out. The customer had no idea what to do and asked the service technician to come back. He then flew across the USA for seven hours, checked out the machinery onsite and finally determined that the emergency stop switch had been pressed! It’s not surprising that the plant could not be started. The idea for Safety Machine Analytics was born.
The new software now enables a customer to visualize the onsite status themselves, for example on a tablet or PC. Without any major effort, they rapidly have a complete overview of the status of all safety sensors at work on their machines, and can very easily increase productivity. “The software only reads out data. It does not intervene in the system,” Patrick Schmid, Strategic Product Manager Integration Products, explains the solution. “One often has no idea why machinery has stopped, because one does not have any transparency about the sensors. We put this information on a dashboard and make it accessible – transparently.”
COLLABORATION IS NOT A FOREGONE CONCLUSION
The collaboration between the safety experts in Germany and the software developers in the USA did not always go smoothly at first. Cultural and methodological differences between hardware and software developers from different countries initially cost time and got on their nerves. Moreover, the infrastructure for shared work tools had to be created, for example equal access to all information. “I am proud of what we did and what we have achieved,” Raphael Rotter, Product Manager Safety Systems, sums up. “We did not give up, despite the initially bumpy collaboration and other difficult circumstances. We stuck to our objective and, ultimately, scored a goal. The Safety Machine Analytics software has arrived.”
“The challenges during the market introduction were even greater than usual because of the Covid-19 pandemic,” adds Patrick Schmid. “We lost a lot of customer visits where we wanted to keep an eye on pilot installations and gather customer feedback. There were simply a lot of cancellations. On the other hand, the coronavirus crisis shows just how important it is for plant operators to be able to carry out onsite diagnoses and analyses themselves.”Safety Machine Analytics is thus an important component for customers that increases productivity on the basis of sensor data.
