Smart Alarm in the Mönchengladbach Service Workshop

With the use of Smart Alarm in its Mönchengladbach service workshop, SMS group benefits from simplified alarm management, uncomplicated fault analyses, and simplified maintenance.

With numerous alarms triggered in plants and machines every day, SMS digital's Smart Alarm lets you see the bigger picture, take better control, and focus on the task in hand. Thanks to various analysis capabilities as well as options for linking pointers to solutions and setting automated notifications, complicated and time-consuming fault analyses have been made simpler. Smart Alarm not only provides a clear overview of all relevant alarms, but also assists with maintenance planning. For this purpose, a dashboard displays the alarm response from the different alarms within a freely selectable period.

SMS group also uses Smart Alarm in its Mönchengladbach Service Workshop to demonstrate to customers how digital solutions work and interact together and how Smart Alarm can be used both effectively and efficiently. The demonstration system used is a CNC machining center, which is the first machine tool to be fully connected to Smart Alarm in the Mönchengladbach Service Workshop. This provides the machine personnel, and likewise the customer, with an overview of the machine's condition – on any terminal device, at any time, and from any location.

The Service Workshop in Mönchengladbach develops individual solutions for customers and provides assistance if any issues arise. With the implementation of Smart Alarm on its own machines, customers can obtain a much better picture of the service and product portfolio and the continuous modernization of SMS plant and machinery using digital technologies and see how these work during use. "Of course, we put our trust in our in-house solutions. We are pleased to show our customers here how they can digitalize their production processes and thus make them more efficient," says Filipe Martins Ferreira, head of the Service Workshop in Mönchengladbach.

Smart Alarm is quick and easy to install: the software can be installed on the customer's system within 48 hours via a remote connection. The component for the encryption and derivation of the data (connector) was installed in the Service Workshop on a dedicated PC in the plant network. The plant was additionally equipped with hardware that provides an OPC UA server. The connector can receive the plant signals from the programmable logic controller (PLC) via the OPC and send them to the Smart Alarm.

The machine on which the Smart Alarm application was installed has a ring buffer from Siemens that, for system-related reasons, is limited to a certain number of messages. Thanks to Smart Alarm, it was possible to expand this buffer considerably, meaning an almost unlimited number of alarms can be stored and retrieved at any time. The user can navigate to any machine condition in the past and thus effectively resolve recurring issues.

Another advantage is that the machine and maintenance personnel can focus more on their actual tasks, as Smart Alarm is able to assign alarms specifically to the relevant expert. What's more, the experts are quickly and efficiently assisted in eliminating malfunctions by self-configurable solutions. Not only that, Smart Alarm can also be used to build up a maintenance history, in order to better forecast the probability of failure. Smart Alarm operates as an additional system and never intervenes in the production process. The individual functions are user-dependent and can be freely configured for each individual user.

With the installation of digital applications such as Smart Alarm in the machines, the Service Workshop is also increasingly developing into a "digital workshop", which can link SMS's in-house digital solutions to third-party plant and equipment.