Production of leak testers by using variant generators

Leak testers are used in industrial production lines for 100% inline leak testing as part of quality assurance. The customers work in the automotive industry, medical technology, heating and air conditioning industry, fittings and household appliance industry, packaging industry and e-mobility. They use the test devices to ensure product quality which also includes product tightness. Worldwide, several thousand CETA test devices are in use in production lines. On the customer side, typically several 10,000 to several million products are manufactured per year and tested in the cycle of the production line. The test devices must be designed to be correspondingly robust and reliable.

After clarifying the technical details of the application and the required functionalities, the test equipment is designed to match the application. They are manufactured order-related. A pre-production is not possible due to the large number of possible variants.

The technical configuration is determined on the basis of 10 main features, whereby there are between 2 and 11 options per feature. Mathematically, this results in more than 400,000 theoretically possible combinations, but not all of them are technically feasible. A set of rules was worked out on the basis of the deliverable properties and the technical specifications. These were included in the variant generator in such a way that only those combinations can be selected that can also be technically produced.

The variant generator is integrated into the SAP Business One ERP system and controls the commercial process (e.g. pricing, dynamic creation of the quotation), the production process (creation of the production order, material reservation and debiting) as well as the generation of the technical configuration file, which is imported into the test device as firmware. The device configuration is automatically stored in the digital device file. This enables various evaluations that are important, for example, for material planning as well as for traceability (especially for components for which the serial numbers are tracked).

Further advantages are the acceleration of quotation generation, the simplification of work for the user as well as the reduction of possible errors. In addition to this variant generator, corresponding generators are also in use for the other CETA test device types (mass flow testers, volumetric flow testers). The use of the variant generator allows the process-safe selection and production of the appropriate test device configuration in lot size 1.