Winners of the Software Innovation Solution of the Year Award: Datawright

Datawright, provider of fully integrated business systems for the manufacturing and field service industries, have won the Software Innovation Solution of the Year Award as part of the European IT & Software Excellence Awards.

This award is a direct result of an IoT (Internet of Things) solution implemented for long-term customer Arlington Automotive NE (previously DPE Automotive).

Now in their 9th year, the European IT & Software Excellence Awards 2017 attracted more than 500 entries. The awards are given for IT solutions that get to the heart of customer issues, deliver business opportunities, a clearer understanding of data, and more efficient and profitable outcomes.

Datawright’s relationship with car parts manufacturer Arlington Automotive NE goes back many years. The company first implemented K8 Manufacturing (Datawright’s Manufacturing focused ERP software) in 1999. Since then, Arlington Automotive have grown considerably and are now a division of global supply chain specialist, Arlington Industries Group Limited.

In 2016, Arlington Automotive’s continued growth meant that real-time performance data was a crucial requirement. As an agile company, they wanted to be able to react to real-time data regarding the performance of their machine presses, during each shift. Arlington have a target press stroke per minute for each machine, but they previously only captured this data the following day, this was often too late to have a direct effect on production rates.

Datawright implemented a solution to link Arlington’s K8 Manufacturing ERP system to two of their presses. Wi-Fi automation devices connected to a micro-switch in each press enabled the presses to become ‘Internet-connected things’. This allowed K8 Manufacturing Dashboards to display real-time performance data, updated every minute. A range of dashboard views were developed for both shop floor and back office monitoring.

Prior to the implementation of the IoT project the average productivity output was 6 parts per minute on each machine. Following the IoT implementation, productivity has risen to an average of 7 parts per minute on each machine, illustrating a 16% gain in productivity.

Garry Luke, Systems Engineer at Arlington said “Datawright have been really excellent Software service providers, explaining requirements we were unaware of, steering us expertly and helpfully, and offering to undertake extra tasks when we were pressed for time. We could scarcely have asked for a better service in any way. I am particularly indebted to the Datawright team who successfully executed the challenge of implementing the task in under 4 weeks from appointment; a tremendous achievement”.

Andy Gough, General Manager at Datawright said, “Datawright have a long and proven record of delivering effective IT problem-solving solutions and value to customers. The Arlington IoT project is a great example of this. The solution was designed and delivered by Datawright, what made the project unique was the fact that it bridged the hardware/infrastructure and software elements of collecting big data, using the Internet of Things and analysing the data collected. It’s fantastic that our work has been recognised by the European IT & Software Excellence Awards.”