Overview

Nord Drivesystems – top MES: Like gears that mesh together

From geared motors and asynchronous and synchronous electric motors to drive electronics: NORD DRIVESYSTEMS offers drive solutions of the highest quality – configured to meet individual customer requirements. Among other things, this requires modern and highly flexible assembly processes. In order to further digitalize these processes, the company now relies on top MES as a central tool for digitalization.

When passengers and their luggage sit safely on an airplane, this is also the achievement of the NORD DRIVESYSTEMS Group. Founded in Bartgeheide in 1965, the family-owned company supplies drive technology for baggage handling and passenger boarding bridges, moving walkways and large hangar doors. And the airport industry is just one of more than 100 sectors that NORD DRIVESYSTEMS equips with individual system solutions – from geared motors to asynchronous and synchronous electric motors and drive electronics with all kinds of specifications. The company is now represented in more than 80 countries and employs around 4,900 people. In 2022, they generated a turnover of more than one billion euros. For the first time in its almost 60-year history.

top MES specially selected for the requirements of the 30 assembly sites at NORD

There are two main reasons for this success: A complete focus on customer requirements and outstanding product quality. To ensure quality, the NORD Group manufactures a large number of the required preliminary products – such as gear wheels or shafts – itself at several locations. The company has been using a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for production planning and control in manufacturing for many years. When this solution was to be replaced by a new MES, the assembly department also expressed an interest. At that time, there was still no standardized system at the more than 30 assembly sites in Europe, North and South America and Asia. Customized software was used at some locations, but in general, paper dominated the process handling. The desire to benefit from the introduction of a new MES in production was therefore obvious and completely understandable.

“When we took a closer look at the new MES for production, however, we quickly realized that this system did not meet our requirements in assembly,” says a responsible Senior Business Architect at the NORD Group. “This was mainly due to the fact that we produce a large number of variants. Our production orders are correspondingly differentiated.

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This wide range of variants is the result of a complete focus on customer requirements. They have the option of putting together the drive technology required for their specific use cases together with a contact person from Sales or independently using a product configurator. The NORD Group uses the LO-VC variant configurator integrated in SAP ECC 6.0 for this purpose. In this respect, it was an additional plus for those responsible in assembly if an MES could be seamlessly integrated into the existing SAP landscape. The MES already used by the production department was also unable to achieve this.

top flow – the right partner for NORD DRIVESYSTEMS

Once it was clear that NORD DRIVESYSTEMS needed its own MES for assembly, the company looked for suitable providers and, after intensive research, came across top flow and the Manufacturing Execution System top MES. The functionalities of the software made an excellent first impression – especially the option of being able to further develop the system independently via ABAP. NORD therefore decided to invite top flow to get to know the software in detail. The company also wanted to find out whether a collaboration would also be conceivable in human terms – an important success factor for long-term projects. The Senior Business Architect reports on this:

“The employees from top flow impressed us in several ways during this meeting: they answered our questions in detail and competently. They also contributed their own ideas on how we could map our very individual assembly as efficiently as possible in IT. This impression was confirmed in subsequent meetings. It quickly became clear that top flow was the right project partner for us.”

Industry 4.0 for assembly with top MES

Initially, IT specialists and key users from the NORD Group and consultants from top flow formed a cross-company project team. In workshops, the project members from top flow then trained selected NORD DRIVESYSTEMS employees in the framework used for top MES. This enabled them to carry out many of the upcoming development tasks independently. Finally, the joint project team outlined the future process flows. It primarily defined three scenarios for this:

The three scenarios for digital processes in assembly at NORD DRIVESYSTEMS

1. digital production order: Until recently, the assembly department received all relevant order information in printed form. The printed paper was also the medium on which the activities carried out were documented. This flow of information was not designed to be mapped in the ERP system – so this proved to be extremely challenging. Thanks to the consistent use of the top MES message dialogs in the assembly process, however, all information is now available throughout the system as soon as it is entered.

2. digital-guided assembly: For worker guidance, NORD DRIVESYSTEMS equipped each workstation with computers with which the information required for the next work steps – for example parts lists, desired configuration, batch sizes and technical drawings – can be called up directly. This significantly reduces the number of paper-based routing slips and documents previously used. Workers now also scan important individual components installed at the workplace using barcodes. This ensures transparency as to which preliminary products and semi-finished products are used in the final product. This is important in order to be able to understand where the error was in the event of customer complaints – and to be able to identify and eliminate possible causes in upstream production based on this. The workers also record the respective processing status of the product in the system. This gives foremen and workers a better overview of whether orders are being processed on time.

3. fault management: Finally, when it came to fault management, it was of central importance for the project team to improve communication between workers and foremen. This is now no longer done on call, but with IT support. This allows the foremen to react more quickly to problems in the assembly process and thus reduce idle times. The software also supports the assembly processes by integrating machine data. This includes, for example, the connection of oil filling systems in gearbox assembly.

“The right oil in the right quantity is crucial for the function of the drive system,” summarizes the Senior Business Architect. “That’s why we need a reliable exchange of target and actual data between the ERP system and the plant control systems. The top MES plays a decisive role in this.”

Fit for the future: SAP-integrated solution for additional NORD DRIVESYSTEMS locations

Thanks to the excellent work of the project team, NORD DRIVESYSTEMS was able to introduce a modern system for assembly control with top MES between 2019 and 2023, despite corona-related challenges for the pilot plants in Aurich, Bartgeheide and Nowa Sol in Poland. The benefits: more efficient coordination of internal processes and greater transparency regarding potential sources of error. Thanks to accelerated feedback, the company was also able to identify cost-intensive idle times.

“We are really enthusiastic about the collaboration with top flow and the benefits of the implemented solution,” summarizes the Senior Business Architect. “We are therefore now planning to gradually introduce top MES at other locations. We very much hope to be able to win top flow as a partner again for this.”

Success Story Getriebebau NORD



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Overview