SPIE : advises manufacturing company Bobcat on a project to digitise its production chain

Malakoff, 30 June 2022 - SPIE ICS and the Industrie division of SPIE Industrie & Tertiaire, French subsidiaries of the SPIE Group, the independent European leader in multi-technical services in the areas of energy and communications, are advising Bobcat on its project to upgrade the synthetic output rates of the production chains at its factory based in Pontchâteau, Loire Atlantique.

Bobcat, a subsidiary of the South Korean group Doosan, is a manufacturer of farm and construction equipment, with two production sites in Europe: one in Pontchâteau and the other in the Czech Republic. In order to accelerate the digital transformation of its 18 industrial sites throughout the world, the Group has chosen to implement PTC technology via the Thingworx platform. This will allow it to store, structure and enhance the value of its data. Decision-making dashboards are provided to the operational teams to enable them to optimise production.

Using industrial data to optimise production

The production line at the Pontchâteau site is made up of a dozen machines controlled by robots from various manufacturers and therefore operating under different protocols. The architecture of the production system adds complexity to data consolidation, which is a major challenge for the client. As a preferred partner for the energy transition and digital transformation of manufacturing companies, the Industrie division of SPIE Industrie & Tertiaire has capitalised on its industrial process expertise to connect to the site production line robots.
"In order to centralise data retrieval on Thingworx, the teams had to set up a new multi-protocol communication server to facilitate connection to equipments with different protocols as they did not have the source code," explains Dominique Tiriau, Business Manager at SPIE Industrie & Tertiaire - Industrie division.

Profiting from all the Thingworx functions

"Today, the screens positioned on the production chains at the Pontchâteau factory enable the teams to monitor their key performance indicators in real time," says Laurent Maille, Global Service Manager Smart Data & IoT at SPIE ICS. "This information are sent to the Doosan Group's Thingworx platform. It is a reliable, secure and adaptive system structured built around a single repository. This convergence of the company's Information Systems brings greater convenience to the employees in their activities."

Convergence of IT and business area expertise

Building on this success, SPIE is now working with the other Bobcat subsidiaries in the USA and its European head office (EMEA) to maximise the rollout of the solution implemented in Pontchâteau across the group's single repository. Thanks to its European network, SPIE is able to support Bobcat internationally, with a global consulting approach to the digitisation of its production tool. "The PTC tools are powerful and allow us to imagine new functionalities. But they are also highly technical and we need expert developers to support these changes with a global vision. Making decisions at the right moment with the right information: this is the true value of industry 4.0," adds Cyrille Piteau ME - Automation & Digitalization Manager EMEA at Bobcat.