How does Plasser Australia achieve efficient and accurate documentation in production?
At Plasser Australia, the leading manufacturer of track maintenance machines in Australia and New Zealand, it's all about practical solutions. The decision to work with Testify for the digitalisation of production documentation reflects this ambition.
In this blog post, we provide a brief insight into the collaboration between Testify and Plasser Australia.
7:00 a.m. in Linz, Austria.
5:00 p.m. in North St Marys, Australia.
With his morning coffee in hand, our Solution Architect Thomas sits down at his desk and starts the video call. On the other side of the world, at the North St Marys production plant, key user Stewart does the same just before closing time. A productive meeting is on the agenda…
But let’s rewind briefly to the beginnings of this project.
Project background
At the end of 2022, Plasser Australia went straight to the starting line with a kick-off workshop and a proof of concept (PoC) to test the effectiveness of Testify in practice. The aim is to improve production-related documentation in the Australian production facility.
Specifically, the focus is on documenting quality control during production and establishing an efficient issue management system. Issues are recorded directly on the production line with several photos.
At the start of the project, Plasser Australia also exchanged ideas with the subsidiaries in India and America that were already using Testify. Here, best practices could be adopted directly.
Within 6 months, the process of production-related documentation at the plant in Australia was converted from analogue to digital.
Meeting of the day
Now back to our video call: The reason for today’s meeting is that Stewart would like to add automatic calculations in the inspection process. Specifically, the idea is that measured values from the wheelsets should be used automatically for a series of subsequent calculations and checks (e.g. tolerances).
Together, Thomas and Stewart go through step by step how this can be configured. The newly optimised process considerably simplifies the work for the employees: once measurement data has been entered, the system uses it for all necessary tests. The system guides you through the individual test steps, displays the results and automatically generates messages about critical values if required. This customisation not only makes the inspection process more efficient, but also significantly less error-prone.
“This saves significant administration time and streamlines reporting processes.”
– Stewart Dunn, Senior Assurance Engineer, Plasser Australia
Previously, the data was collected, entered into a spreadsheet programme to perform validation calculations and then transferred to Word reports.
Now with the integrated calculation functions in combination with the validation checks within the Testify checklists, it has the advantage that the pass/fail information is immediately available and a PDF report is automatically generated.
The special thing about Testify: Powerful tool meets personal support.
This also reflects the core values that distinguish Testify from a simple checklist app:
Our platform can map many things, from simple checks to in-depth, complex industrial processes. And if questions arise during implementation, we sit down with the customer to resolve them.
We provide personal support and take the customer by the hand during implementation. Because it is important to us that our customers’ digitalisation projects succeed. 💚
Outlook
Plasser Australia’s digitalisation project is currently in the rollout phase:
The next step is to establish the entire shop floor and digitally integrate the stakeholders along the value chain for the future machines. Testify is an active sparring partner for mapping more complex requirements and their simple configuration within the platform.