Ravensburger AG, founded over 135 years ago, has always stood for the values of fun, education and togetherness. The mission of the international group of companies is “playful growth”. The most important and probably best-known brand, the blue triangle, is synonymous with attractive and multi-award-winning puzzles, games and activity products. The international brands BRIO and ThinkFun complement the range of the games, children’s and youth book supplier with over 2,100 employees worldwide and headquarters in Ravensburg. The company entered industrial production back in 1962. Since then, the automation of production and logistics, in combination with convincing product innovations, has formed the foundation of the company’s continued success.
“We manufacture a large number of different products at the Ravensburg site. Effectively controllable production is therefore also the be-all and end-all for us. However, we lacked end-to-end transparency in production. It was also difficult to determine meaningful KPIs. The decision in favor of a high-performance MES was therefore an obvious one,” explains Tobias Liebing, CIP Manager at Ravensburger Spieleverlag. “We therefore contacted other companies in our lean network to find out about their experiences. We focused on the functions, the expandability of the system, its reliability, the provider’s service and, last but not least, the costs.” A FASTEC customer is also part of the network, which aroused Tobias Liebing’s interest in the MES FASTEC 4 PRO: “The reference visit to Ritter Sport was also particularly helpful for us in our decision-making process. Although our products have nothing in common, the intensive exchange of experience enabled us to optimally match our requirements with the performance spectrum of FASTEC 4 PRO.”
Only eight weeks passed between the first workshop and the fully functional pilot installation. “This short period of time underlines the very well coordinated project participants and the targeted approach to the topic of MES at Ravensburger,” reports Nikolai Dauner, Senior Sales Manager at FASTEC.
The pilot installation currently includes Machine Data Acquisition on five systems. Production data and system malfunctions are reliably recorded here. These can also be tracked from the office at any time via live monitoring. A wide range of options are available for reporting the now reliable key figures: OEE, TEEP, NEE and many other KPIs.
The planning envisages implementing further FASTEC 4 PRO modules and binding additional machines. A bidirectional interface to SAP is also to be generated.
Despite all the ambitious plans, CIP Manager Tobias Liebing places particular value on one statement: “Lean production is based, among other things, on the principle of bringing together competencies and responsibilities, working in networks and synchronizing processes in the best possible way. This creates transparency, which in turn stimulates the continuous improvement process. The prerequisite for this is the integration of all employees involved in production through production-relevant information and a defined goal. We therefore take open and transparent communication between colleagues very seriously. It is important to us to involve all employees on the path towards Industry 4.0. That’s why everyone has full access to the FASTEC 4 PRO reports.”
