Towards Intelligent and Sustainable Production: Combining and Integrating Online Predictive Maintenance and Continuous Quality Control

The paper addresses intelligent and sustainable production in the sense of combining and integrating online predictive maintenance and continuous quality control. The rationale for combining and integrating them is that continuous quality control can provide input to the online predictive maintenance in cases where no signs of maintenance issues have been indicated and inadequate output is produced (and the process parameters cannot be adjusted in order to meet the output specifications). The paper outlines the first part of an action research effort at Gestamp HardTech AB in Sweden, whose objective is to keep its position as a world-leading provider of press-hardened vehicle parts. The first initial design criteria concerned with simplicity and low-cost was changed after learning more details and what can be accomplished, and the updated first design criteria focused instead on robustness, high-quality output and future-proofing. The intermediary result is an action plan for the technical change, whereas the organizational change will be addressed later during the action research effort.