Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant has implemented automated quality control system

Automated process control system (APCS) for Barber bogie castings manufacturing was developed at Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant (managed by United Wagon Company). The system has not comparable to it has been used in Russia. The system provides output of products with improved reliability and safety.

The Tikhvin Car Building Plant’s foundry processes automation has a goal to exclude non-quality products supply on public railway and minimize production losses. APCS developed at the enterprise are based on international experience and oriented on special features of rolling stock maintenance in Russia. As a result, the TVSZ’s requirements to information capacity of the trace and control quality system used for castings particularly are higher than state and industry standard requirements.

Uniqueness of developed APCS is to provide walkthrough control of car bogies production started with material and components purchase and ending with finished product output. Every casting is assigned with unique serial number that can be traced throughout the entire lifecycle in order to protect from counterfeit goods.

The multistage system is based on maximal process automation, material movement control between process stages, defect prevention and storage of complete information on defect level of output products.

Due to ERP-system Infor LN capabilities and its integration with process equipment when loading data automatically, TVSZ employees have online access to the full and actual information on the APCS output.

As a result of foundry and bogies & cars assembly control system implementation at the TVSZ accompanying paper documents were abandoned and electronic passport printing was implemented. The next step will be implementation of 2D casting marking under the programme, carried out by Non-profit partnership “Union of industries of Railway Equipment”.

APCS has all the necessary technical capabilities to be integrated into a common base of automated control car-repair system, developed by the Federal Railway Transport Agency to check freight castings for culling.

“APCS allows managing and registering all information on operations and measurements, used for casting in the manufacturing process ― said Vladimir Kapustin, a project manager.  — The system is capable to trace each parameter that helps to detect non-conforming product timely and exclude it from further movement on production. At the same time all characteristics of casting are absolutely objective because automated system excludes human mistakes”.