Revving Up India's Automotive Industry with Lubi Electronics' Smart Manufacturing Solutions

Interview with Lubi Electronics

With the world’s fastest-growing major economy, India has a range of industries poised for extended long-term growth. The country’s automotive industry is a prime example, as it races to meet ever-increasing domestic and international demand. At the same time, automakers must ensure precise coordination of their supply chains and production lines in order to maximize their advantages in the increasingly competitive global marketplace.

One means by which India’s automakers are outpacing their competitors is by obtaining products delivered by original equipment manufacturers (OEM) that make use of efficient production and testing of vehicle components and testing systems. Such a provider of these services is a client of Lubi Electronics. Headquartered in Gujarat, Lubi focuses on the development of IoT value-added integrated platforms to provide their customers with smart manufacturing solutions that consistently deliver the right products, services, and support on time and on budget.

Personalized Production that Puts Consumers in the Driver’s Seat

Thanks to a variety of technological advances, the ways in which vehicles can be personalized are continuously expanding. Where buyers were once limited to deciding on features such as sunroofs and all-wheel drive, a far larger set of options are now available, with interior elements such as seating now being among the details that can be customized according to specific consumer preferences. While a widerange of materials including textiles, plastics, metals, leather, and wood, has long been used in seating design, the capacity to optimize the use of these materials to give customers exactly what they want has never been so high. The appearance and feel of seats are regarded as “feel-good factors” that ensure customer satisfaction, but more practical properties such as the stiffness, strength, and safety of materials and components are also possible to customize.

Not surprisingly, offering personalized seating designs while simultaneously ensuring that production lines operate at maximum efficiency is dependent upon the latest advances in smart manufacturing technology. Essentially, manufacturers need the ability to alter a wide range of details without slowing the flow of production through a complex productionline of robotic arms, sensors, and other factory instruments.

WebAccess/SCADA: Browser-Based Software for Optimized Automation

This is where the automated seat testing solution provided by Lubi Electronics comes in. As a leading provider of value-added engineering solutions for industrial automation products, Lubi provides a wide range of innovative, efficient business processes for seamless data acquisitionand visualization. One specific example incorporates a Lubi solution for a seat testing system designed to determine the quality of vehicle seats withunparalleled reliability and speed. The system’s loading table is used for both loading and horizontal positioning of the seats in the y-axis. Simultaneous horizontal positioning of the load cell in the x-axis enables the system to determine the axial stiffness of all areas of the seat surface, while the system is also used to test sensor mats incorporated into the seat that control elements of the vehicle’s automatic settings such as airbag deployment.

Most critically, the testing system and the massive amounts of data it provides can be seamlessly integrated into the overall production line thanks to Advantech’s WebAccess/SCADA IoT software, a browser-based SCADA software package for supervisory control, data acquisition, and visualization. By combining Advantech’s industrial grade PC with PCI DAQcard, such as the PCI 1245L DAQ card, a 4-axis stepping and servo motor control universal PCI card, and PCI 1711UL DAQ card, an entry-level 12-bit A/ D converter, up to 100 kHz sampling rate, 16-ch universal PCI multifunction card, the system has allowed Lubi to improve production line efficiency whilst reducing the downtime of their clients’ manufacturing.

A Domain-Focused Industry 4.0 Solutions Provider

As India’s automakers continue racing towards Industry 4.0, they want smart manufacturing solutions that simultaneously integrate data from a wide range of factory equipment while also providing actionable insights for proactively managing and optimizing production, maintenance, energy usage, and planning. By partnering with Advantech to leverage its factory automation offerings, Lubi Electronics provides fully integrated solutions that make it easy for production line managers to identify workflow bottlenecks and optimize subsystems for maximum efficiency.

Furthermore, as a member of Advantech’s WISE-PaaS VIP Alliance, Lubi Electronics will continue to collaborate with Advantech to develop even more application oriented smart manufacturing solutions, providing its auto industry clients with the cutting-edge solutions they need to stay at the forefront of industrial innovation. By providing manufacturers with fully integrated software/ hardware solutions like this seat testing system, Lubi is putting its auto industry clients on track to leave the competition behind.