Kepware’s IoT Gateway Provides Faurecia with Data to Improve Traceability for Top Automotive Customers

Faurecia supplies components and systems to some of the world’s largest original equipment manufacturers. Its operations span automotive seating, interior systems, automotive exteriors, and emissions control technologies.

Recognized for its operational excellence and technological expertise, Faurecia continually develops products and production processes that improve vehicle performance, comfort, style, and environmental impact. Delivering consistently high-quality products, however, increasingly required the company to provide customers with greater visibility into how individual parts were produced.

Large automotive OEMs expected Faurecia to track production processes and make detailed information available on demand. Customers needed to know not only which components were installed in specific vehicles, but also how those components were installed. For airbags, for example, required data included the torque and angle of installation.

The underlying production data was already available, but Faurecia’s existing approach to collecting and distributing it could not provide the efficiency and scalability required. An initial OPC server solution proved unreliable, resulting in lost data and server overloads. Meanwhile, their existing OPC DA communications were becoming increasingly complicated and antiquated.

Faurecia needed a more dependable way to:

• Connect diverse PLCs across the factory floor
• Collect and communicate manufacturing data efficiently
• Store detailed production records for long-term traceability
• Give customers greater transparency into products and processes
• Scale the approach across international manufacturing operations

Faurecia implemented the REST Server Agent in the IoT Gateway for Kepware Server, using connectivity already in place across the factory floor. The solution served as the communications layer between the plant’s PLCs and the manufacturer’s proprietary Manufacturing Execution System.

Using the IoT Gateway, the company collected data from shop-floor equipment and communicated it to the MES over REST/HTTP. The MES could then store the information needed to satisfy customer traceability requests spanning several years.

Because Faurecia’s developers were already familiar with REST/HTTP, they could use an established IT protocol rather than devote additional time and resources to implementing more complex communications. The approach also enabled the company to connect leading shop-floor devices while reducing the effort required to troubleshoot communications.

The implementation provided:

• Connectivity to Allen-Bradley, Modbus, and Siemens devices
• Faster communication between plant-floor machines and the MES
• A familiar REST/HTTP interface for development teams
• Long-term storage of production and traceability information
• A scalable foundation for extending transparency across additional location

With the IoT Gateway serving as the communications medium between factory-floor PLCs and the MES, Faurecia gained the visibility required to provide customers with detailed product traceability. Automotive OEMs could use the resulting manufacturing data to satisfy regulatory requirements and improve product quality for consumers.

The impact extended across the company:

• Improved parts traceability: Production information could be captured and stored throughout the manufacturing process.
• Faster communication: Machine operators reported faster communications between factory-floor equipment and the MES.
• Stronger quality analysis: Quality assurance teams gained access to the industrial data needed to analyze production quality.
• Reduced development effort: Developers could spend more time creating solutions to increase shop-floor productivity and less time troubleshooting connectivity.
• More informed decision-making: Manufacturing data became accessible from the shop floor to the boardroom, supporting smarter and more nimble decisions.
• Greater scalability: The company established an approach that could be extended across its international operations.

Most notably, Faurecia reduced what had been scoped as a complicated six-monoth transparency project to a functioning solution implemented in just a couple of days. The result was significant time and revenue savings, improved operations, and greater customer satisfaction.

Building on the success of the initial implementation, Faurecia plans to scale the solution across additional factories and explore proactive machine analytics. The company also envisions giving plant supervisors access to production data on tablets, enabling real-time adjustments to reduce unplanned downtime and improve operations.