Geobrugg AG
«It’s what you do with the collected data that matters.»
Jürg Atz, Head of Production, Geobrugg AG
The story in brief:
Geobrugg AG from Romanshorn has safety and innovation in the blood. That’s why the company depends on a cloud system landscape which unifies all devices and makes appealing data visualisations possible.
Geobrugg AG from Romanshorn (TG) develops and manufactures solutions to protect against natural hazards such as rockfalls, landslides or avalanches. The company also offers protection from all types of accelerating objects in mining and tunnelling, on race tracks, in manufacturing and elsewhere. As a business that produces globally, Geobrugg places great emphasis on internal processes. Back in the noughties, it already introduced a lean management strategy to reduce types of waste to a minimum. By employing this tactic, the company created the right foundation for later digitalisation steps – and today benefits from lean processes at all levels.
«The data is updated in real time, and the painstaking manual Excel maintenance of the past can now be completed with a few clicks.»
Jürg Atz, Head of Production, Geobrugg AG
Challenge:
Geobrugg AG produces safety systems at its worldwide locations. Until recently, all machine data reporting was done using countless Excel spreadsheets; this was error-prone, time-consuming and no longer up-to-date. The new objective was to create a cloud-based central database that would store the most accurate performance and defect data for every machine and standardise it for analysis and visualisation. To centralise the reporting, it was also necessary to integrate data from machines that are not connected to the network.
Solution:
The innovation-driven company strived for quick and effective implementation. In close cooperation with Swisscom and thanks to its expertise, a low-code app was developed using Power Apps within a very short time. The app simplifies the collection of offline machine data and enables fully automatic upload of online machine data to the Azure Cloud. Integrated validation prevents incorrect entries, thus increasing data quality. Power BI is used as the front end and for the visualisation of the aggregated and processed data.
«We are much better able to control our production costs thanks to the data analysis, and we can see 24/7 which machine is producing what kind of output.»
Jürg Atz, Head of Production, Geobrugg AG
Time-consuming manual Excel maintenance is also a thing of the past: reports can now be prepared with just a few clicks and the data is updated and visualised in real time. The rapid availability of data has decisive advantages for maintenance. Unplanned machine downtimes are detected within seconds and the causes are determined with just a few clicks. Problems are solved faster and output is increased. Additionally, management benefits from key figure assessments that are attractively structured and, with each international roll-out, from an improved foundation for investment and decision-making.