Fast and affordable failure analysis

At Achema, Bosch Pack­ag­ing Tech­nol­o­gy pre­sent­ed its new data min­ing ser­vice, which has recent­ly been added to the range of phar­ma ser­vices for sol­id dosage forms. The ser­vice is offered by the Bosch sub­sidiary Hüt­tlin. The aim is to eval­u­ate exist­ing machine data more effec­tive­ly to iden­ti­fy and elim­i­nate root caus­es. “So far, about 50 per­cent of devi­a­tions have been clas­si­fied as ‘human error’,” says Dr Marc Michaelis, expert for con­tin­u­ous pro­duc­tion and process ver­i­fi­ca­tion at Hüt­tlin. “Yet we assume that this is true for no more than ten per­cent. The rest is often mis­in­ter­pret­ed due to miss­ing infor­ma­tion. As a mat­ter of fact, there is already enough data avail­able to get to the bot­tom of the caus­es. How­ev­er, there is a lack of knowl­edge and time to read this data cor­rect­ly.” First projects have shown that new pat­terns and fail­ure caus­es can be defined and reme­died in the pro­duc­tion process thanks to data min­ing, and can help to achieve a more sta­ble prod­uct qual­i­ty in the long run.

Correct interpretation of machine data

Thanks to the data min­ing tool, it is now pos­si­ble to exam­ine large amounts of data for the small­est effects using sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods. In gen­er­al, the data from two pro­duc­tion batch­es is already suf­fi­cient to draw first con­clu­sions. The more data is avail­able for eval­u­a­tion over a longer peri­od, the more details can be iden­ti­fied. All it takes is machine sen­sors, which already col­lect data on almost all his­tor­i­cal machines, as well as the right tool to dis­close the data. “Large invest­ments are not required to use the exist­ing data more effec­tive­ly. The key to suc­cess lies in merg­ing knowl­edge from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines,” says Michaelis. “Bosch not only has the nec­es­sary tech­ni­cal exper­tise, but also exten­sive process knowl­edge in cus­tomers’ prod­uct man­u­fac­tur­ing. To iden­ti­fy rea­sons for process devi­a­tions, which are not obvi­ous at first sight, we teamed up with the sta­tis­tics experts from our Bosch Cen­ter for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence in Ger­many and the U.S. Togeth­er we will raise the data treasure.”