Analys och kvalitetssäkring av materialkittningen till en svetsanläggning

Sammanfattning: Ålö AB in Brännland produces and manufactures front carriers for the agricultural industry. The first step in the production of front carriers is the kitting area. It is important to have a continuous flow of high-quality incoming material which today is achieved by a manual kitting process. Depending on the operator's knowledge and experience, it suffers from naturally occurring variations in quality and bout 2-5% of the kitted frames have insufficient quality. Ålö AB wants to reduce this number to ensure less interruption in the production.  The aim of this project is to map and analyze the current flow and kitting method and to propose a verification system so that the correct material is kitted in the rack for each frame. Four potential concepts are evaluated: loading cells, camera optics, smart racks and logistics processes. A matrix compares ergonomics, cost efficiency, cycling time and technique level for all potential concepts. Loading cells, which conducts a precise measurement of the products weight and compare it with the reference range, is chosen as the most suitable solution. An experimental study determines the actual weight and deviations of the completely kitted rack, this deviation is ±0,65 kg. All specific articles are exchanged for another to see how the weight varies.  The results show that if wrongly kitted articles that easily can be detected by the operator are excluded the loading cells have a precision of 90%. Implementing loading cells does not exclude integration of additional concepts into the system to further improve the kitting quality, for example with the use of Machine Vision.