Building a car has come a long way from the infamous picture of Henry Ford’s assembly line, which transformed the manufacturing in the early 1900s. Instead of workers lining up to put together all the many parts that make up a motor vehicle, machines and automatons do the work instead, speeding up the build while […]
Building a car has come a long way from the infamous picture of Henry Ford’s assembly line, which transformed the manufacturing in the early 1900s.
Instead of workers lining up to put together all the many parts that make up a motor vehicle, machines and automatons do the work instead, speeding up the build while reducing errors.
But having a factory of machines managed by a person is also dated – now carmakers want not only to be able to connect their equipment to allow for AI management and automation, they also want to be able to extract data from the process.
Doing so, however, requires robust and reliable connectivity, and lots of it.
As Stephen Mason, advanced digital technologies manager – Global Industrial Operations at Jaguar Land Rover, explains:
“There was such an increased number of devices the business wants to connect, whether it be it sensors, edge devices, connected working devices. Simply, any device now must be connected in some form to extract out the data.
“Our legacy networks would then struggle with that, and the cost to grow those networks often would be very difficult.”
He was speaking at Mobile World Congress on the Ericsson stand, after giving a presentation on how the British carmaker’s relationship with the Swedish telco had helped it transform its factor in Solihull, all powered by private 5G.
Accelerating into Industry 4.0
Jaguar Land Rover’s Solihull factory sits on a 300-acre site and employs around 9,000 people in manufacturing roles. Originally built to make engines for vehicles used in the Second World War, it was originally owned by Rover, which merged into British Leyland, before production ceased on all car lines except for Land Rovers, which have been built there ever since.
JLR’s Solihull factory builds thousands of Land Rover cars every year
Ownership has passed through the hands of Rover Group, which was owned by BMW then Ford, and finally Jaguar Land Rover, when the companies were remerged following the acquisition by Indian giants Tata Group in 2010.
Following its acquisition by the Tata Motors division, Solihull saw significant investment, and has continued to produce primarily Land Rovers, with some Jaguar models including the XE and F-Pace, also being built in the West Midlands facility.
When it came to adopting industry 4.0, building a robust network was a vital step for Mason, but he also had a personal interest.
It was at the industry trade fair Hannover Messe that Mason first saw private 5G for enterprise being promoted by the likes of Siemens, Nokia, and – notably – Ericsson
He smiles: “It’s also true that I like to see use cases, things like AGVs (automated guided vehicles), robotics within manufacturing, robotic dogs and all that kind of stuff, and that requires quite a lot of network capacity.
“We also began to suffer from intensity [on the network] as well. In some of our areas, we have a lot of connected devices on Wi Fi, which is a relatively unclean spectrum.
“We didn’t really know what the solution was a few years ago when we went to the Hannover Messe. Everybody had these huge 5G signs. And not, not just the Ericssons, but telcos, the ones who would expect it was some of the industrial players, the seniors at the boards and other companies, and that began our kind of journey on, maybe is a solution for this.”
When Mason met the Swedish manufacturer – best known for supplying antennas and kit that empower mobile networks directly to the telecoms sector – he admits to being sceptical about some of the claims made about 5G.
“The technology is sold as being able to penetrate at the level of a concrete box, and we were dubious to begin with,” he explains. “We’d been burned before with Wi-Fi, which of course has its limitations. We just wanted to see what was true.”
JLR agreed to a pilot programme which connected a series of native quad GSA devices and several non-native devices in order to carry out a proof of concept.
Mason recalls the signal penetration was “absolutely wild” during the tests, which initially involved condition monitoring, but was then expanded to building connectivity into siloed paint-shops, that previously couldn’t be connected.
“That’s something we didn’t expect, given the amount of interference and moving parts.”
Need for speed
Following a successful trial, JLR worked with Ericsson and the UK integrator arm of Japanese IT firm Fujitsu to deploy a private 5G network at the facility.
The deployment uses the n77 band (at 3.8-4.2 GHz) in the UK, licensed by Jaguar Land Rover itself. It offers coverage “almost everywhere”, including areas that were previously “notspots”, at speeds of around 900Mbps.
One initial challenge that Mason discusses is difficulty in finding applications and devices that would connect to a private 5G, or ways of adapting their existing portfolio to connect to the new network.
“When we started down this road a few years ago, there wasn’t initially that many industrial endpoint manufacturers who had this sort of solution in their portfolio,” he explains.
This was where the collaborative nature of the relationship with Ericsson became vital, he adds.
“Building up the ecosystem became very important,” says Mason. “Often we would mention one of our existing partners or manufacturers to Ericsson and within a few weeks they would come back saying this partner was now part of their ecosystem and had already been certified, ready to create a device that could connect to the network.”
This, he acknowledges, is a key aspect of making Industry 4.0 function.
“You need to find the right partners that have that industry experience and bring them into an ecosystem of connected devices, in order to take down those barriers of access.”
Another key benefit has been the ability to pull significant performance data back from JLR’s existing and newer machinery. This has led to significant operational efficiency benefits, Mason adds.
“The more information we can get in terms of condition-based monitoring, predictive maintenance, the more we understand about our machinery and when something may fail and start to intercept that beforehand, that then will drive the uptime.
“Ultimately more vehicles out the door. Even more than that, we’re trying to strive for world-class vehicles. The more data we can understand, we can build higher quality vehicles, smarter vehicles. It puts us on the journey of that intelligence.”
Brush with success
What is next for JLR’s private 5G journey? Mason says that after initially starting with the body shop, because it was an “easy location” to deploy due to its open area and abundance of devices, the company has begun looking more at its paint shop.
A look inside JLR’s 5G-powered factory
Mason says: “The way a vehicle is produced, we have a press shop which takes that bare metal, stamps it into the shapes; the Body Shop, which joins those parts together, be it welding the bonding glue and so on, and then into paint, and then finally into trim form, where it all comes together.”
Most car making facilities will have multiple press shops, body shops etc, but just one paint shop, which is split across five stories, and has huge vats of liquid.
“Getting connectivity across there is difficult even though the paint shop has been there for over 20 years. It is barely industry 3.0, let alone 4.0. To run an area like that on live Ethernet or cover in Wi-Fi is so difficult, which is why we haven’t done it – the benefit doesn’t outweigh the cost.
“But that is the next big area we are looking at, because if you already have the network cores on site, and with the penetration we’ve seen elsewhere being so good, we hope it can work well in the paint shop.
The integration of Ericsson’s Private 5G technology is expected to serve as a catalyst for further innovations within JLR’s manufacturing processes.
Potential future applications he outlines include the use of digital twins for virtual simulations, advanced robotics, and enhanced supply chain integration.
The carmaker is also eyeing the opportunity to replicate the private 5G setup at some of its other facilities, with its factory in Slovakia expected to ape the setup in the coming years but using a tranche of local operator-leased spectrum instead.
Of course, the horizon could also include more AI, powered by the 5G network.
He concludes: “Obviously the amount of news around AI and how AI is looking to transform a business, being able to enable and power that AI, being able to feed it with our specific data, so not off-the-shelf models, the data that’s true to our specific scenarios and get the most out of the AI. It’s exciting to be on the leading edge of this.”
