Starting point.

Hutchinson’s business is the mobility of the future. The group’s intelligent solutions aim to anticipate customer needs, combining innovation with exceptional performance. Hutchinson’s primary production sites are all situated in Europe. At one of them, in Aachen, Germany, the company has notice boards at four points across the premises, providing employees with relevant information on the effectiveness of both production workers and machines. The company wanted to replace these boards with an intelligent digital signage solution to be able to deliver information faster in the future.

Project objectives.

The Hutchinson group wanted to leverage the latest in digital signage technology in order to deliver information with the minimal need for personnel resources while enabling production workers to quickly and easily access the information they require to maintain productivity and efficiency.

It is important for our employees to see information on current machine usage at various points around the premises. So it was just logical to turn our information boards digital. The system enables optimal and real-time visualisation of all information on the NEC displays with minimal need for intervention by our IT staff. This means we save time and free up personnel resources.

Thomas Dreyer, IT, Hutchinson GmbH, Aachen

Process.

Bechtle considered all the requirements Hutchinson placed on the future system and developed a concept that would meet them all and enable easy, automated matching of a variety of data.

Solution.

The solution centers on the Bechtle Screen Media content management system (CMS), which automatically polls current data from Hutchinson’s production environment and feeds it to the digital signage system.

 

The data is visualized on a NEC MultiSync V484-RPi display at each of Hutchinson Aachen’s information points. Thanks to their 500 cd/m² brightness and anti-reflective surface, the monitors guarantee an excellent picture in typical lighting conditions. The 48" (122 cm) displays are built for digital signage and come pre-installed with the NEC Edition of the Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module with extended onboard memory of 16 GB and intelligent digital signage capabilities. This extra performance means the system is ready to be embedded into the Internet of Things (IoT).

 

However, as Hutchinson did not want to expose its internal production data to the internet, the company, together with Bechtle, opted to fit each of the displays with a NEC OPS Sky i3 4-64-W7eA slot-in PC. These computers are sealed off from the web and add a separate Windows system to each monitor without adding to the physical footprint of the solution.

 

The Bechtle Screen Media software feeds relevant data for production workers to each of the Windows systems. To this end, the solution taps into Hutchinson’s WAKE UP programme, which measures and visualizes machine and worker effectiveness. The CMS connects to this data source, enabling the new information system to analyze and render information in real time.

Business benefits.

The new digital signage system installed at Hutchinson Aachen combines computing power with 24/7 operation and enough screen real estate for both large-format messages and granular information. Employees can quickly gather what they need to know when passing by the information points and even from some distance away. All four NEC displays, as well as the slot-in PCs, are managed centrally by Hutchinson’s IT department using NaViSet Administrator 2 software. This ties up less IT staff and ties in perfectly with Hutchinson’s business processes.