BMW

Background: BMW's manufacturing plant in Dingolfing, Germany, is BMW's largest production site. The plant produces the BMW 5, 6 and 7 Series.

Challenge: The plant in Dingolfing had a variety of analogue radio systems for different departments, most of them were out of date and service. Therefore they needed to be replaced by a single digital communication system for all users. Furthermore, the German car manufacturer needed to replace and improve the automatic fault notification system in the Dingolfing plant's production line to gain more efficiency.

Solution: Sepura provided an entirely automatic fault notification solution which unifies Voice and Data and improves efficiency within the manufacturing plant. The solution is part of a complete digital mobile communication system delivered by Siemens and operates on a TETRA network supplied by the TETRA infrastructure provider Rohde & Schwarz. The digital communications system covers the whole area of the manufacturing plant, including all the office buildings and all the connecting roads. Whenever a fault occurs on the production line, the maintenance team receives an automatic message SDS (Short Data Service) on their TETRA terminals directly from a server.

This SDS is generated with predefined text. The text is sent to the TETRA radios of the relevant maintenance team, where one team member has to accept the job manually.

• If no team representative is able to accept, the system resends the SDS up to three times, after which the request is escalated to a supervisor who then makes the final decision with regards to job allocation.
• If more than one operative accepts the repair job, only one of them will be automatically selected to receive instructions to attend the fault.

Sepura provided an SDA (Short Data Application) which considerably simplifies the reading and acceptance of the jobs by reducing to a minimum the number of interactions needed to accept or reject a maintenance job. All messages within the
system are generated automatically with a single selection of a field within the SDA message. The SDA works with a server but, in the event of server failure, the backup system is able to deliver the messages seamlessly.

The solution proposed by Sepura was selected by BMW as it was able to meet the following requirements.

• Automatically display of fault messages.
• Job acceptance in less than three key presses
• Automatic registration of job acceptance on the server
• Confirmation sent to user upon job allocation
• Ability to operate with a redundant system and to switch seamlessly between systems.

Answering the needs of industry

Around the world Sepura TETRA digital radios are used by manufacturing plants to help businesses operate more efficiently, with clear and flexible communications.From car manufacturers to shipyards, industries are discovering the huge benefits of Sepura TETRA digital radios.

The challenges

• Introduce a secure and reliable communication system where all relevant teams can use voice and data at all times and without any network reception interruption.
• Overcome areas of poor reception and receive clear audio in areas of loud ambient noise.
• Communicate with mobile and exchange phones.
• Provide emergency alert for lone workers.
• React quickly to any emergency.

The solution

Sepura's high performance radios Sepura designs, develops and supplies TETRA digital hand-held radios for use by personnel on foot and mobile radios for installation in vehicles, such as cranes and fork lift trucks.

The benefits

Reliable, uninterrupted reception and swift communications help save time and money. When maintenance repairs to a production line are quickly addressed a manufacturing plant saves on lost output and revenue.

Talk Groups enable staff to handle tasks with clear and reliable communications. Staff can belong to a variety of talk groups at the same time and can be contacted at once with instructions and information relevant to the specific group. Talk groups can include staff working on the same production line in a factory, crane operators in shipyards or workers in a specific section of a container port.

GPS tracking enables the effective deployment of the workforce which can often be widely spread over large areas and makes the organisations more responsive.