RITTAL GmbH & Co. KG

With control cabinet systems, cooling units and edge data centers, RITTAL GmbH & Co. KG supplies products for the interfaces between industry and IT. The company’s system solutions can be found in over 90 percent of all industries worldwide – at the Meyer Werft shipyard as well as in the Vatican Library or at CERN. At its Haiger site in Hesse, Germany, RITTAL expanded its control cabinet production into a Smart Factory. The goal: a continuous, completely digitalized or automated process from order entry to the store floor to product delivery.

The award winner networked around 300 employees and 250 machines using approximately 10,000 data points across all production lines. Digital twins for the products, plants and production improve the quality of the data obtained as well as transparency along the process chain. Expanding the employees’ perspective beyond their own work area proved to be an important success factor. This makes it easier for the entire team to understand the effects of process changes.

RITTAL’s Smart Factory is geared towards optimum value creation “from customer to customer”. This means: All process steps from customer order, through production, to packaging and delivery are interconnected, integrated and, if necessary, automated.  This is orchestrated via a web configurator (RiCS) – which includes automated detailed planning (SAP-APO), engineering and ordering processes, and customer integration. In the plant, FTF-based logistics also supports the employees.

The RITTAL team succeeded in optimally combining analytics data, error messages and live dashboarding in the manufacturing process of the control cabinets in a “Virtual Factory”. This improves cooperation with customers from product configuration through to delivery, with customers able to access complete product data and create 3D-supported designs of their control cabinets. In addition, series requirements from stock reports, sales forecasts and configurations outside the standard are automatically transferred to the ERP.

The “Call-4-Help” escalation medium enables rapid intervention in the production process, for example in the event of errors or changes. It provides employees with direct contact to the support area and documents how the deviation or error occurred. This process flow can be easily visualized even without IT expertise. All in all, Call-4-Help improved the learning culture in the Smart Factory: Errors and their causes are identified and clarified more quickly, so that corrective measures also take effect in less time.