Challenges

Volvo prides itself on strategically differentiating its vehicles on quality and engineering excellence. In today’s rapidly changing market, customization has become the new normal. This presents new quality assurance challenges as product complexity and unique configurations increase in volume and rate of change.

“Volvo’s engines are very sophisticated with 4,500 different engine information variants for just one plant and 13,000 variants for the full plant for referencing,” explains Geoffrey Blanc, Manufacturing Technology Manager at Volvo.

Engine quality control and assurance in Volvo’s manufacturing plants are subject to rigorous quality checks, a task reserved for Volvo’s most experienced technicians. In one plant, each engine requires 40 checks, with 200 possible quality assurance (QA) variants, which must be completed at the QA station in only eight minutes.

Training new operators on these complex inspection procedures takes five weeks, which adds to the overall cost of quality. The laborious process is paper-based, not only creating extraneous cognitive load for the operators, but also mobilizing time and resources to update, print, and distribute QA materials regularly.

Indeed, the challenge is to establish and maintain a consistent data flow and systems connections to create operational efficiency across the value chain. “As we know, the trucking market is subject to significant variations. To us, flexibility in the plants means how fast we can implement new shifts in production to follow the market,” says Bertrand Felix, Manufacturing Innovation and Technology Manager, Volvo Group.

As they looked at various solutions, agile support for the increasing product complexity and custom configurations coming out of engineering and upstream manufacturing processes and scalability across global operations were critical requirements.

Solution

Volvo chose to utilize enterprise augmented reality suite of capabilities, but also for its end-to-end solution for creating and scaling a digital thread. The ability to integrate product and manufacturing lifecycle solutions across the value chain was a key differentiator.

Volvo also leveraged the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to enable real-time data synchronicity.

“At Volvo Group Trucks Operations, we have a lot of homemade execution systems, so we had to integrate everything, and we have decided to use AR solutions as much as we can to make critical connections and ultimately achieve a digital thread across our operations,” says Blanc.

Finally, this single source of truth created by the digital thread will be delivered through the lens of augmented reality, ensuring QA workers can access and view the latest engine configurations and supporting materials in near real time.

Using a AR experience, operators can quickly recall the most up-to-date configurations in 3D to ease the burden of sorting through stacks of paper, creating gains in productivity, quality control, and overall process efficiency. The AR solution is delivered using mixed reality, which overlaying 3D data and QA details directly on to the physical engines and utilizes computer vision to track and anchor the content.

In addition to removing the cost and risk of the paper-based approach, the solution also enables the QA technician to capture specific defects through the AR experience, which can be sent upstream to improve engineering and manufacturing processes.

This bi-directional data sharing can help to analyze defects in real-time, further improving Volvo’s quality and throughput. The feedback loop created by the establishment of a digital thread provides timely operational insights and captures vital feedback to improve future engine designs and further differentiate Volvo on quality and engineering excellence.