Pankl Racing System AG

Goodbye, black box. Hello, transparent manufacturing!

Transparent manufacturing for high-speed products

The Austrian company Pankl Racing Systems AG, based in Kapfenberg, north of Graz, is a leading international manufacturer of high-tech precision parts for dynamic components in the global niche markets of racing, luxury cars and aviation. The company wanted to fully digitalize and automate its production. The main goal: absolute transparency in production. MAIT took on the task - and achieved much more for Pankl. The secret: a lot of know-how and the elegant combination of two powerful software components.

Pankl Racing Systems AG is always in motion. Just like its customers. They come from the aviation, racing, luxury car and road haulage industries. The company designs and manufactures engine components, turbochargers, drivetrain and chassis parts and forgings at several locations around the world. One of the company's particular specialties is additive manufacturing, more specifically metal 3D printing. All components have one thing in common: the demand for absolute top performance. A highly innovative manufacturing company like Pankl relies on performance, precision and efficiency in all areas, not just production. It was therefore time for Pankl to digitalize its production. The main goal was to create a more transparent production process that relied less on employee data and more on sensor data. This would facilitate predictive production planning and enable real-time quality assurance and control through target/actual comparisons. Pankl also wanted to be able to derive information about the efficiency of individual profit centers in production from the newly acquired data.

Sector Manufacturing Industry, Metal Processing

Region Styria

Company size 2,500 employees

Optimal basis for Production 4.0 - thanks to Abas ERP

The conditions for fulfilling this wish list could hardly be better at Pankl. Why is that? Because the company has been relying on Abas ERP for a quarter of a century. Abas ERP is one of the world's leading ERP software solutions for medium-sized manufacturing companies and enables integrated company processes across all business areas. The MAIT company Nittmann & Pekoll (N&P) acquired Pankl as a customer in the mid-1990s and has been supporting them with Abas ERP ever since. At that time there were only ten users, today there are almost 250 full licenses and 130 shop floor licenses in constant use at Pankl.

"With the help of Abas ERP, Pankl has been able to optimize and automate its business processes step by step for 25 years. Thanks to the extraordinary upgradeability of the Abas software, customers like Pankl can work with the same ERP system for decades and remain technologically up-to-date at the same time".

Christian Nittmann

Managing Director and CEO of N&P

MAIT connects two worlds

For this reason, Pankl contacted MAIT Austria (at that time still TECHSOFT) on the recommendation of N&P.

The Linz-based specialist software and technology partner for the manufacturing industry was asked to integrate a solid IoT solution at Pankl. At the same time, Pankl did not want to do without Abas ERP. The experience with the system over the past 25 years was too good and the company's users were too satisfied. Not least because the customizations they had made themselves had always been retained despite the many updates. A higher level of technology and investment security is hardly possible in the ERP sector.

MAIT then forged exactly the right tool for Pankl. The ingredients: the leading IoT platform ThingWorx from PTC and a customized interface to Abas ERP. The result: a newly created solution that brings together the production orders from Abas ERP with the information from production precisely and in real-time.

By monitoring and comparing the automatically recorded machine and operating data with the orders, any disturbances in the production process are immediately recognized. These events then immediately trigger messages to the ERP or appropriate actions. For example, if the sensors of a machine report an unplanned downtime, this information is automatically forwarded to Abas ERP. The machine operator then has to enter the cause of the downtime, e.g. missing raw material, in the Abas Shop Floor Terminal. Or an employee at Pankl is responsible for several milling machines and receives new production orders via Abas ERP. She now needs to know when which machines will be available again so that she can assign them to the new orders. Since the implementation of the new solution, this information is available to her as live data from production, without having to collect it herself. She can see in real time what is happening on the machines and when they are expected to be available again.

MAIT Austria has put all its expertise into the development: extensive knowledge of ERP, PLM and machine production in equal measure. Knowledge that has grown over the years in numerous software and IT projects in these areas. "Based on numerous measurements and sensor data, employees now have a complete and accurate picture of production at all times. This means that production planning can be optimized step by step," says Christoph Schauermann from MAIT, who has supported the introduction of the IoT solution and its connection to Abas ERP at Pankl from the very beginning.

Impressive results and potential for improvement

To date, MAIT has already connected a quarter of all machines at Pankl and brought them onto a standardizsed data layer. The aim of the ongoing project is, of course, to integrate the entire machine park. But the immense benefits of the new system are already apparent, first and foremost the high level of transparency: for the first time, orders can be located very precisely and easily in production. Quality control and assurance are now at a new level thanks to real-time monitoring. Current and future machine utilization can also be monitored and optimized much more quickly. This makes predictive production planning much easier and more accurate. As a result, Pankl can now also plan procurement, human resources and all other dependent or upstream business functions more efficiently.

According to global studies, Pankl is already beginning to see what consistent digitalization of production can actually achieve: A 20 percent increase in throughput, a 30 percent higher yield, a 60 percent increase in productivity and a reduction in downtime of up to 30 percent are all within the realm of possibility. And yes, significantly lower production costs.

So there's no question that Pankl will continue to drive the company's digital transformation in the future. Of course, there are already concrete ideas for further application scenarios to be digitalized. These include real-time monitoring of production performance and automated control of systems. Pankl also hopes that the system will eventually be able to form patterns and learn on its own, so that it can calculate failure probabilities and reject rates from the available information. In short, predictive analytics as the basis for quality assurance and maintenance.

This is still a dream for the future. But it's a good thing that the company already has the right partners in MAIT and N&P for the gradual further development of digitalized production. And it is even better that Pankl can get all the necessary services from a single source.

How MAIT digitalized here

Abas

Abas ERP

PTC

PTC ThingWorx