Borzaduct
Introduction
Thirty years of maintenance know-how, on a tablet at the press
The brief
The people who knew the machines were about to retire
Borzaduct makes ventilation components on eight stamping and forming lines, some of them older than the technicians who maintain them. Three senior technicians were due to retire within two years. Their knowledge lived in handwritten shift logs and in their heads, and when a press stopped at night the answer was usually a phone call to one of them.
Before
- Press stops at night
- Technician checks the manual
- Calls a senior colleague
- Trial and error
- Fix noted on paper, if at all
With Zephyr
- Press stops at night
- Technician describes the fault on a tablet
- Assistant shows causes and past fixes
- Repair follows proven steps
- New fix is logged for next time
What we did
Capture the fixes, then put them where the fault happens
We digitised eleven years of shift logs and fault reports, indexed the machine manuals, and spent twelve days on the floor with the three technicians recording and annotating 400 fixes. The result is a maintenance assistant on ruggedised tablets: a technician describes the fault or scans the machine, and gets the likely causes, the steps that worked last time and the relevant manual page. In parallel we analysed scrap data from line 4 and found two tooling-wear patterns that explained most of it.
- Digitisation of 11 years of shift logs
- 400 fixes recorded with senior technicians
- Manual and parts-list indexing
- Tablet assistant for the maintenance crew
- Scrap analysis on stamping line 4
- Tool-change schedule based on wear patterns
The outcome
Results
−23%
mean time to repair across the eight lines
2.2%
scrap on line 4, down from 3.1%
400
annotated fixes captured before retirement
The assistant has been in use on all three shifts since early 2024. Two of the three senior technicians have since retired. Night-shift call-outs to off-duty staff have dropped by roughly two thirds.
“When Laci retired, I thought we would lose half of what the plant knows. It is on the tablet now, in his words.”
What was involved
- Shift-log digitisation
- Expert knowledge capture
- Shop-floor tablets
- Scrap analytics
Other projects
All work
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