Industry: Home appliances and HVAC/R industry (heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration)
Key technologies:
Flexus AGV Hub
Areas of application:
Multi-stage production logistics
Special features:
Maximum transparency along the production chain through direct control of autonomous mobile robots from SAP.
Maximum transparency along the multi-stage production chain
Diehl Controls, which specializes in scalable electronic systems, uses a solution from Flexus AG to control its autonomous mobile robots directly from SAP, thereby creating maximum transparency along the multi-stage production chain. In addition, transport has been optimized and the workload on employees has been reduced.
Diehl Controls, based in Wangen im Allgäu, develops and manufactures scalable electronic systems. The company, which operates in Europe, America, and Asia, is one of the world’s leading suppliers in the home appliance and HVAC/R (heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration) industries. Around 50 million electronic devices are delivered worldwide each year for use in heat pumps, washing machines, and many other end devices. Diehl Controls employs more than 3,400 people, who generated sales of €443 million in 2023.
The Future Factory in action
Diehl lives up to its lofty claim of being a “future factory”: the term is emblazoned on several information boards in the sparkling clean production halls of Diehl Controls in Wangen. This is where high-quality control systems and electronics for household appliances and, above all, heat pumps are produced.
The shiny floor was renovated just a few months ago – no wonder, since regularly renewing and improving processes and equipment is part of the company’s DNA. This is also evident in the seven autonomous mobile robots from MiR that move around the facility, ensuring that the material flow in island production is fully automated.
Four of the vehicles have a special design with a conveyor belt that’s made for delivering and picking up circuit board magazines. One other MiR is made for pallets, containers, and trailers.
Driverless transport systems have been in use here since 2018. After initial experience with another manufacturer, Diehl Controls opted for MiR systems in 2020.
“This will increase transport volume
says Christian Biewald, Project Engineer Supply Chain Management at DIEHL CONTROLS, who is very relaxed about this change given the positive experiences with Flexus.
by a further 50 percent.”
Transparent control directly from SAP
“Initially, we could only use the robots for a single product because MiR’s fleet management system was not yet connected to our SAP system. If we had used the transport systems for multiple products, we would have quickly lost track of where which goods or semi-finished products were located,” recalls Christian Biewald, Project Engineer Supply Chain Management at Diehl Controls.
Against this backdrop, the company sought software that could connect MiR’s fleet manager directly to SAP. SAP was to generate the transport orders and make them available to the vehicles without middleware in accordance with the AGV standard VDA 5050. Status messages on ongoing and completed transports were to be automatically reported back to SAP so that WIP (work in progress) stocks could also be accessed at any time.
“Flexus was the only provider that could offer us an AGV hub solution integrated into SAP that met our high transparency requirements,” says Biewald, who launched the implementation project in 2022. Following the kick-off in the second quarter of 2023, the Flexus solution went live twelve months later.
Flexibility and speed
“I was very impressed by Flexus’ flexibility and speed. Even our special requests were implemented within a very short time,” emphasizes Value Stream Manager Stefan Wespel.
One of the biggest challenges was connecting a second floor that can only be reached by elevator. “The robots not only have to communicate with the elevators, but also load the map of the respective floor,” reports Wespel.
The mobile robots now serve any number of production processes and products, which are transported on optimized routes with a minimized proportion of empty runs. This is ensured by the Route Optimizer integrated into the AGV hub, while the current locations of all robots are visualized on a map in real time.
The increased transparency benefits production planners in particular, who no longer need to be on site and can now conveniently monitor current production progress on their screens. The handover interfaces between the two shifts now also function completely smoothly.
Up to 3,000 transports are carried out every day. “This will increase the transport volume by a further 50 percent,” says Christian Biewald, who is calmly anticipating this development based on his positive experiences with Flexus.
“I was very impressed by Flexus’ flexibility and speed. Even our special requests were implemented within a very short time.”
Stefan Wespel
Value Stream Manager DIEHL CONTROLS
Automation at the highest level
The system includes a modular storage system for PCB magazines from CTS, a shelf storage system from Kardex Remstar, and a KUKA robot cell in which all PCBs are tested fully automatically in stacks of four.
In addition, the transfer and receiving points for the ten production stages controlled by the robots were defined. To buffer the differently timed work steps, the magazines containing the semi-finished circuit boards are parked in the CTS warehouse under a new product number after each production stage.
The workstations equipped with sensors automatically trigger the collection orders for semi-finished products as needed. Tablets with a Flexus dashboard are mounted at the other workstations, allowing employees to manually request robots—the rest of the process then runs fully automatically.
“We are very satisfied with the result and expect to recoup our investment within two years.”
Christian Biewald
Project Engineer Supply Chain Management Diehl Controls
Looking to the future
The introduction of the AGV hub was part of an overall project to optimize production processes at Diehl Controls.
“We are very satisfied with the result and expect to recoup our investment within two years,” estimates project manager Christian Biewald, who already has his sights set on the next steps.
In the future, a second elevator will be integrated into the transport processes. This will enable the raw materials, which are currently still transported by tugger trains, to be transported fully automatically. “This will increase the transport volume by a further 50 percent,” says Biewald.
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