The Siemens factory in Buffalo Grove uses EthonAI to overcome challenges of traditional visual quality inspection systems.
Industry
Electronics
Location
USA
Product
Inspector
The Siemens factory located in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, specializes in electronic products for automation in the infrastructure sector. These products are critical for ensuring more connected and sustainably managed commercial buildings, data centers, and healthcare facilities. To uphold the high standards of reliability and safety in their finished products, rigorous quality control is indispensable to their production process.
The factory’s setting presented unique challenges for traditional visual quality inspection systems. The spatial constraints made it difficult to accommodate the bulky hardware usually deployed for simultaneous inspection of assembly and packaging. As a result, workers had been performing manual inspections, leaving them to react to quality defects late in the production process. Therefore, Siemens Buffalo Grove needed a flexible, compact, and cost-effective solution to navigate this complex inspection environment. Additionally, they were in search of a solution that could easily adapt to new lines and stations and would integrate seamlessly with any industrial camera hardware.
Chris Paolinetti
Quality Engineer at Siemens
EthonAI’s Inspector software efficiently addresses a range of challenges in assembly and packaging inspection with minimal hardware needs. One of its key advantages is that it can integrate with any industrial camera. Customers can use any standard camera to create a space-saving solution, addressing the common problem with traditional systems like Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) systems. Furthermore, the software offers a factory frontend application that provides visual feedback to workers on the production floor. This facilitates real-time defect identification and intervention. The software can be implemented quickly, reducing integration time from days to mere minutes.
Alexander Dierolf
Head of Data Value Center at Siemens Smart Infrastructure
The EthonAI Inspector software now simultaneously verifies the correctness of both assembly and packaging at Siemens Buffalo Grove. Due to the software’s flexibility and minimal hardware requirements, the assembly line workers can easily conduct visual quality inspections. This has led to a marked improvement in effectiveness and efficiency of the quality control process. Siemens Buffalo Grove is now scaling the EthonAI software to multiple workstations to manage their quality at scale.
Impact
Visual inspection with intuitive feedback
Compact
The EthonAI Inspector overcame challenging spatial constraints for building a high-performance quality inspection system.
Quick Integration
Extremely fast factory integration. The time-to-value is reduce to hours instead of weeks.
Workforce Support
Thanks to visual feedback from the Inspector, workers now fix issues early and avoid costly rework at later stages.