VEM and Tetrion create a new gold standard for documentation of equipment

Wernigerode/Leverkusen, December 15, 2021 | At a working meeting this fall at the headquarters of VEM motors GmbH in Wernigerode, the engine manufacturer and the maintenance company Tectrion GmbH got down to business: Since November, the two partners have been classifying and documenting equipment according to current standards. The cloud-based collaboration platform SAP AIN is used together to ensure that central documentation is always up to date.

"We are pleased that Tectrion, as a pioneer in the application of this innovative Industry 4.0 technology, is taking this step together with us," said Dr. Joachim Koch, Managing Director of VEM motors GmbH. Sascha Büttgen, head of the SAP AIN project at Tectrion, is certain: "By offering plant operators digital documentation of their equipment across the entire life cycle and company boundaries for the first time, we are creating enormous added value."

VEM will in future deliver motors to Tectrion that are provided with nameplates in accordance with the recently published DIN SPEC 91406 "Automatic identification of physical objects and information about the physical object in IT systems, especially IoT systems". These nameplates have both a QR code and an NFC chip. By implementing this new industry standard, engines will be clearly identified worldwide and the transition to the digital life cycle file will be enormously simplified.

At the same time as delivery, the manufacturer uploads the characteristics of the equipment into SAP AIN, which are classified based on the industry standard eClass. This master data is supplemented by PDF documentation based on the structure of VDI 2770 "Minimum requirements for digital manufacturer information for the process industry", which describes the standardized nature of manufacturer information. In addition to the greenfield documentation provided by the manufacturer, Tectrion maintains inventory data, such as information on modifications or test reports, and thus also covers the further life cycle steps. In addition, Tectrion offers the documentation of the brownfield, i.e. the equipment used in the plant, according to the standards described as a service. This approach not only enables audit-proof documentation. The bundling of all relevant information about each piece of equipment across the entire life cycle is intended to create a valid “digital twin” of a complete system in the long term, to which IoT data will also be added in the next step. Plant operators can assess risks and make investment decisions on this basis.