As you listen to music in your car or instruct your home assistant  to change the thermostat, you’re probably interacting with a product built by Premium Sound Solutions (PSS). Every year PSS produces over 120 million speakers for the automotive and consumer goods industries.

In recent years PSS struggled to operate more efficiently due to a buildup of manual and paper processes. “We didn’t use real-time data in production and decisions were made based on information on white boards or paper records,” said Stijn Van Uytfanghe, Global Digital Transformation Program Manager at PSS.

PSS began their digital transformation journey in 2021 and selected Mendix to consolidate its systems, mitigate shadow IT, and deliver modern manufacturing solutions. Today, PSS has developed an ecosystem of connected applications that are making production more efficient and increasing customer satisfaction.

Investing in Digital Transformation

Prior to 2021 production processes at PSS were manual and time intensive. Without digital tools to carry out their work, team members were increasingly developing shadow IT solutions.

PSS recognized that a digital transformation strategy was critical to the longevity of their business and ability to:

• Deliver products at the pace expected by customers in the automotive industry.
• Improve employee safety and job satisfaction.
• Standardize processes across their production sites.
• Future-proof operations as groups of their workforce begin retiring.
• Protect their profit margin and impact the bottom line.

The long-term ambition is to deliver a digital control tower, where autonomous and intelligent systems are guiding operations without human intervention. To get there, PSS needed a platform that could lay the foundation – connecting their data, processes, and people. Then, in the future, orchestrate intelligent enterprise processes.

PSS began exploring rapid application development platforms. They ultimately selected Mendix, which offered several capabilities to meet their current and future transformation needs:

• Being a web-based platform in line with IT’s cloud-first strategy.
• Proven track record of supporting key production use cases.
• Flexibility to address use cases in other departments across the business.
• Ability to accelerate development cycles and compatibility with Agile practices.

“Furthermore, by leveraging features such as the Mendix Public Cloud, we don’t have to take care of the service infrastructure because that is fully managed. For our small team this allows us to focus on the development and value of our applications,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Tackling Maintenance & Changeovers

When Van Uytfanghe joined PSS, he visited each production site to uncover the most pressing digitalization use cases. The first priorities were applications to manage their maintenance and changeover processes.

In both cases PSS evaluated several options to build on their own or buy off-the-shelf. When looking at other rapid development tools, PSS found that Microsoft Power Apps could not handle the scope of these projects adequately. Furthermore, off-the-shelf maintenance options did not offer the global support that PSS required for their team in China.

PSS worked with a Mendix expert partner – Apvine – to accelerate these first projects:

• A maintenance application, which manages both corrective and plant maintenance tickets and offers greater insight into local maintenance activities.
• A changeover application, which guides operators through machine settings and work instructions when they switch from working on one type of product to another or between shifts.

The value of these solutions validated that Mendix was not just a one-off development tool but could be the standard for rapid development. “Today, everything that we are digitalizing in Operations should be done with Mendix,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Real-Time Production Monitoring

A suite of business process monitoring tools developed with Mendix have become the core of PSS’ daily plant operations. “We created these applications to collect data and monitor plant health so that we could see anything that was holding us back from reaching our targets and take action,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Three applications are providing an integrated and layered view into the operating rhythm of the production line:

• Business Balance Scorecard provides a dashboard for the C-Suite and general managers to review monthly during business review meetings.
• The Plant Health application is used to report out to management during daily plant performance meetings.
• The KATA application is used by line operators to monitor the performance of the production line on an hourly base and by production management during daily production line standup meetings.

Instead of huddling around whiteboards and walls of Post-its and paper, the team will gather around the Plant Health meeting applications for review sessions. Dashboards display the output of every production line – something PSS never had real-time access to – and are accessible on mobile devices for plant managers who may be off-site.

“This used to be manual monitoring, manual calculations, and manual escalations, so we made a digital version of it. We have huge smartboards in production which offer the same functionality, but with historical data available in a database and not on paper anymore,” said Van Uytfanghe.

With more accurate and real-time monitoring, PSS can better understand how to address issues that may be impacting business metrics like units per hour (UPH) and first time through (FTT).

These are measured on an hourly basis and operators on the production line will log observations in the KATA application if targets are missed. From here, line leaders, process engineers, technicians, quality engineers and others can review the comment logs, then use an Action Module to document the containment actions and conduct root case analysis and PDCA.

“The benefit is that we are focusing on short-term actions so that we can improve the output of the production line continuously and prevent issues and waste before it even happens,” he continued.

Other applications have been added to further reduce manual production work such as:

• “Post-It”: Previously team members would leave Post-its on each other’s computers with instructions or notes when they changed shifts. This digital replacement mimics the same activity and can be accessed on desktop and mobile, minimizing potential information loss.
• SPC Analysis: Historically logging statistical process control (SPC) analysis would require team members to walk around, take notes, go back to their office to populate an Excel file, and then manually enter data to output any trends. Now, team members can use the SPC Analysis mobile app directly on the shop floor and get a real-time analysis, allowing for quicker intervention if there are deviations from specifications.
• Check It: A configurable module that has digitized several paper checklist processes, saving multiple FTEs of effort across different sites. The digital checklist information can then be used for QRQC escalations, during audits and root cause analysis.

Developing a Custom MES

These successes paved the way for PSS’ most ambitious undertaking yet – developing their own manufacturing execution system (MES) with Mendix.

Previously four variations of an MES were used across six PSS plants. These systems were homegrown or developed by third parties either in Python or Excel. Furthermore, none were integrated with SAP, so data had to be manually re-entered across systems.

Having worked with system integrators in the past, Van Uytfanghe knew that buying an off-the-shelf MES would be very costly for PSS in terms of licenses and customizations. With other Mendix applications already supporting tangential production processes, PSS decided to limit the scope of MES functionality and build on their own.

After 3 months of development, the MES MVP was available for every plant and is now scanning every speaker. Key features of the system include:

• Tracking Packaging Activities: At the end of the production line there is a packaging station where the speakers are tested acoustically and run through visual checks.
• Speaker Scanning and Validation: When the speakers are packed into the handling units, operators will scan a barcode and verify if the material is correct, if the barcode content was correct, and if the acoustical test was successful. By implementing scanning the customer requirements regarding traceability are also covered.
• Integration with Core Systems: MES extends and adapts the core functionality of SAP to support PSS’ processes and interacts with other applications like KATA and Plant Health.

“We’ve replaced all those systems with one standardized process and system. Every site is working the same way, the visualization is the same, and it is integrated with SAP, so we are not adding information manually anymore. It’s a big improvement,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Having access to real-time data has already introduced major process improvements. In one instance, the system was logging downtime where operators countered that they were still active and assembling.

But, after looking at some videos, the Van Uytfanghe saw that the operator was walking a few meters away to get extra packaging material before they could start scanning again. A simple fix – moving the packaging material much closer to the operator – could save hours every week.

Feedback from the field has been more than encouraging, with team members reporting greater job satisfaction. “One user told me that it was much easier to do his work and he didn’t have to stay past his shift time to do administrative work. He could focus on tasks that bring more value instead of entering data and managing Excel files and paperwork,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Sounds of Success

With Mendix, PSS is moving upward in achieving their digital control tower. For the first time PSS has standardized systems connecting their data, processes, and people on the production line.

“In the past we had situations where engineers would have to process years of paperwork to do something like identify a machine issue and quantify the cost of downtime. Now, we’ve digitalized all our production events and are building up historical data so that we can make improvements and get ahead of potential issues,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Van Uytfanghe offers some tips for other organizations getting started with Mendix to accelerate their success:

• Lean on Mendix expert partners to guide you in your early days and learn through co-development.
• Fully adopt an Agile way of working.
• Align your development projects to organizational and departmental priorities to get people on board.
• Don’t wait for the perfect project or conditions – just get started.

“At a certain point you have to just start experimenting and learn by doing. One of the biggest benefits of Mendix is that it doesn’t take a lot of effort to show a working prototype – then it also gives us the security and stability to grow,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Even for projects as large as their MES, PSS was able to deliver a first version at a fraction of the time and cost anticipated. “If we used something off-the-shelf it would have cost us 1 to 1.5 million Euros at least, and with Mendix it cost us a couple hundred thousand Euros,” said Van Uytfanghe.

Furthermore, their in-house team has control over updates and can bring new features to life on a weekly basis. PSS is also experimenting with new projects like connecting Mendix applications to AGV’s, Siemens PLCs (programmable logic controllers), and bringing AI into their processes.

Today, solutions like MES, Kata, and Plant Health directly impact PSS’ business operations and are laying the foundation for a more intelligent and data-driven future.