Design and Implementation of Poka-Yoke System in Stationary Spot-Welding Production Line Utilizing Internet-of-Things Platform

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of a poka-yoke system in a stationary spot welding (SSW) production line. The human-based SSW production process in a local automotive component company was considered in this study. Due to the repetitive and fast cycle-time of the production process, human errors are inevitable. Such errors lead to customer claims with the subject company. Based on the data of customer claims, there were three major quality issues (missing nuts, wrong-size nuts, asymmetrical spot weld marks). Due to the production line being manual, control of planned production and actual production was poor, leading to delivery issues (delayed delivery). Together these major issues contributed to 34.7% of customer claims on average from May to December 2018. The objective of this study was to solve the issues in the subject company through design and implementing a poka-yoke system utilizing the internet-of-things (IoT) platform to ensure data acquisition and information storage, and production progress monitoring and data analysis to meet user requirements. The combined approach of the poka-yoke system utilizing IoT in the SSW production line yielded satisfactory results with reduced customer claims to 5.3% for the stated problems from February to May 2019. Hence, the design objective was achieved.