Desoutter

Automotive

Take up your Shield to improve manual tightening quality and traceability

June 1, 2023

Take up your Shield to improve manual tightening quality and traceability

As a new year begins, Desoutter is more determined than ever to help its customers accelerate their transformation to Industry 4.0. In the coming months, I’ll be revealing the latest tools we have developed to boost uptime, boost productivity and accelerate your transformation to digital ways of working.

Our first innovation for 2021 is the QShield-C, a smart digital wrench within the Desoutter Ecosystem. This new wrench improves the level of accuracy in manual operations and allows 100% traceability of jobs performed in production and rework stations, boosting uptime, boosting productivity & flexibility.

The QShield-C is designed to facilitate tightening in narrow spaces with a high degree of accuracy and angle control. This smart tool supports the operator by providing the task parameters that will achieve a perfect result time after time. The feature management function available through the Desoutter Ecosystem makes feature selection easy and keeps the operational parameters relevant and simple.

Deployment of this wrench reduces tools inventory, because it covers a large range of torques and can be used for various assembly processes with an error-proofing on the end-fitting that is selected. This in turn reduces associated maintenance and calibration costs, as well as freeing up valuable space on the production floor because there are less tools to store. Maintenance is also more predictable and easier to achieve thanks to the Desoutter Digital Twin, which stores all the information about each QShield-C smart wrench and makes it readily accessible at any time. In addition, the QShield-C features an easy pairing to connect it as a backup process tool in less than 10 seconds.

Crucially, this smart wrench continuously provides real-time feedback to support wider production strategies: facilitating the move to Industry 4.0 ways of working and delivering the necessary electronic “documentation” for the jobs previously performed with non-reporting mechanical wrenches. The QShield-C feeds data regarding manual tightening tasks into the Desoutter Ecosystem in real time, giving full traceability and enabling production managers to gain valuable insights into tightening performance as it happens. For example, it brings flexibility in reworking dynamically NOK detected joints upwards of the production line. Besides this, the collected data can be analyzed to spot trends as part of a continuous improvement programme: driving out waste and cost to increase overall efficiency.

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Whether you are just starting your Industry 4.0 journey, or you are looking for the next step towards full digitalization of your operations, the QShield-C smart digital wrench is a great choice.