How Bombardier managed to save 40 working hours per vehicle.

Digitized quality processes and traceable testing documentation leads to real time savings

About Bombardier

Bombardier is a global leader in the transportation industry, continuously striving to set new standards in the sustainable production of train and plane vehicles. Their product range covers the full spectrum of rail bound vehicles, vehicle components as well as signaling and control technology. Bombardier combines technological expertise with empathy and innovations and thus creating benefits to operators, passengers and the environment.
While Bombardier’s HQ is based in Berlin, one of their worldwide engineering sites is based in Vienna, Austria. Here, more than 600 employees are focusing on design and manufacturing of trams and light rail vehicles for the world market.

Customer Bombardier
Date May, 2019
Website www.bombardier.com

Digitized quality processes and traceable testing documentation leads to real time savings.

Every year there are built about 150 state-of-the-art trams for the world market in the Viennese factory of Bombardier Transportation. Testify is used for the test of vehicle control units and the final inspection of trams: Thousands of checkpoints are now handled digitally in Testify, instead of on paper checklists. Occurring Issues can be documented and processed in real time to responsible engineers. As it is still common nowadays, Bombardier used paper checklists for inspection purposes. These completed paper checklists needed to be transferred manually to a digital System.

How it worked at Bombardiers‘.

Software Challenge

Vehicle Security is top priority.

Complexity of the product, high quality standards and the low batch size production (which is common for the light rail sector), is challenging the quality control system. The quality software needs to be simple to use, support the employees in their processes and help to not forget any quality checks.

DoCumentation

Quick reactions in case of error is key.

Yet, the occurrence of issues triggered a cumbersome process of documenting issues, attaching images and assigning new tasks. Data integration of 3rd party systems was time consuming and did not happen software automated. This raised another source of error.

Testify integration in detail

Keep what’s tried and tested.

At Bombardier proven quality processes for initial vehicle control have been improved and established over years. Testify enabled Bombardiers’ head of QM to map and display their processes in a digital way by using Testify’s checklist tool. The tool provides enough freedom to describe and illustrate the very individual and specific processes and requirements of each check, allowing to attach pictures or additional instruction tipps.

Digitalizing the team.

The quality testing team at the Vienna site was equipped with smartphones, allowing them to use the testify mobile app. Thus, testify ensures location independent access to the created checklists and enabled a digital documentation when executing the tests.

Collaboration made efficient.

By adding user profiles of all relevant employees, potential issues can be easily shared and assigned among the team in real time. Pictures and other relevant information can be directly added and thus provides a clear overview of the issue, the responsible employee and actual status.

Real-time reacting.

Each status of checklist execution as well as the issue handling process can be monitoring in real time by using the app. This allows managers to gain real time status insights. Additionally, the documentation with testify is audit-proove and traceable through all steps.

Individualisation of interfaces.

Testify comes with a open interface that worked in the case of Bombardier to integrate the 3rd party systems of sensors. This automated data exchange allows to include sensor data in real time reports. For further integration of vehicle data from 3rd party systems, Bombardier developed a individualised system interface in close alignment with testify. They used one of their existing communication modules for train control and modified it to interact with the testify open interface. Specific actions of trams can now be also triggered using the testify app.