Data powers an organization’s digital transformation, and ST Engineering MRAS is leveraging Spot to get a full view of critical equipment and facility. Working autonomously, Spot collects information about machine health—and now, thanks to an integration of the Leica BLK ARC for reality capture, detailed and accurate point cloud data for their digital twin. 

“There’s been three areas where we’re really getting a lot of return for our investment. Automation in the manufacturing side of it, and then our digital technology, our digital thread through our factory, such that the factory kind of talks to us, and Spot will be part of that. Right?

There’s also a personal sense of comfort that I know that in when I’m not here, when my people aren’t here, the maintenance crew is thin, there’s somebody out there looking to keep an eye on things.”

Mitchell Smith, Vice President of Operations, ST Engineering

Transcript

Marc Hemling, Principal Manufacturing Technology Architect, Advanced Manufacturing Systems: If you want to ask what Spot’s doing for us, it’s gathering data that we didn’t have before. And it allows us to build a database filled with records of critical equipment statistics that we can go and eventually use to diagnose or prevent machine failures, to help keep uptime, and even safety of the people that work around the machines. My name is Mark Hemling. I’m with ST Engineering. We’re a one point five million square feet facility, and we manufacture composite bonus for aircrafts.

Mitchell Smith, Vice President of Operations, ST Engineering: So primarily, we make here our thrust reversers or nacelle systems, anything you can see from the window of the airplane around the engine. The only thing most people ever see of the engine is the blades. Everything around it is what we make.

Hemling: As we continue to grow the business and we bring in new technology to help us both manufacture our products, but then also maintain our facility, we need to push to not only bring the equipment technologies that we use to manufacture components, but also the facility itself to ensure that we can run at peak efficiency and maintain the quality and production level required to make our customers happy.

Smith: The process we use here are energy intensive. On a monthly basis, just in electricity, we spend maybe three hundred thousand dollars worth of power. Right? So one of the things that we do is that we want to make our systems here that utilize that energy the most efficiently that they possibly can.

Howard Simon, Senior Manager of Facilities and Automation, ST Engineering: You try to do daily machine checks, weekly machine checks, but as your maintenance team gets pulled on hotter tasks, more urgent matters, there’s times when those routines and daily tasks can be skipped. And what we found is skipping those when you have the amount of equipment that we have in this factory just continues to have a pile up effect in some ways. You could miss something critical in between those times.

Hemling: We currently have Spot doing inspections throughout the facility for our critical equipment or category one. It’s utilizing its Spot Cam for thermal inspections, but also the Fluke SV600 for acoustic imaging. It’s looking at things like motors, electrical components, and it’s really capturing the current status of our machines and equipment. It is inspecting things like our autoclaves. They are dangerous pieces of equipment. They are pressurized vessels. But also, if the autoclave ROM were to fail, it’s a large monetary loss for products that sometimes they’re not recoverable.

Being in a facility that is ninety five years old, we do have engineer drawings of the facility, but they don’t really capture everything. There are components and things that may have been left from sixty years ago that are still here and not captured. But now with the added capability of the Leica scanner, we can now create a 3D model of our facility. It allows us to almost take a snapshot in time and something that you could walk through and see the changes that we make.

Smith: There’s been three areas where we’re really getting a lot of return for our investment. Automation in the manufacturing side of it, and then our digital technology, our digital thread through our factory, such that the factory kind of talks to us, and Spot will be part of that. Right?

There’s also a personal sense of comfort that I know that in when I’m not here, when my people aren’t here, the maintenance crew is thin, there’s somebody out there looking to keep an eye on things.

Hemling: Several times a year, we’re making big moves throughout the factory. Keeping up with that is very hard. It would probably be a multi week operation with multiple people. As soon as they’re done, we’d probably need to scan again because we changed something.

Having the dog walk through the factory and routinely capture the facility will be the backbone of our scans, and it will provide a lot of insight. You go and you set these missions up, and then say we want to run it every quarter, every week, every day. The ultimate value in the BLK Arc is time. Time is what it saves.

Not only is it gonna be great for our business in terms of the inspections and everything, people see it and they’re just amazed. Say you brought Spot to a job fair, I don’t know how to explain it, but Spot has this ability to just draw people in.

Smith: The younger population, it’s natural to them.

They’ve grown up expecting this to be the future of manufacturing. The way we present it to them is that it is part of our strategy, part of how we’re gonna grow our business. We’ve been here ninety five years. I’d love to be here for another ninety five years. Those kids are the ones that are gonna be here. The work we’re doing now isn’t for me. It’s really to put things in place so that ten, fifteen years from now, as those children become part of the workforce, our operators, our engineers, our staff here, for them it’s just normal.