Dashboards for increased insight into laser cladding : Advancing data collection and visualisation to increase insight into the laser cladding process at Van Halteren Technologies

This thesis was conducted at van Halteren Technologies Boxtel, where laser cladding errors during production are causing excessive costs. Two directions were found to reduce these costs. Direction one is about improving operator knowledge, training and procedures. The second direction is about improving data collection/ visualisation and enhancing process insight. The second option was chosen as a subject for this thesis. The laser cladding process was analysed, and the key indicators of an exemplary process were found. It was noticed that a clear overview of all process data was missing and not displayed correctly to stakeholders. The same goes for data resulting from quality control. Data streams were coupled and stored in a new database to make this readily available. From here, informational (live) dashboards were built to display historical and live data. In the live dashboard, ‘traffic light ‘ indicators were included with logic behind them to communicate the process’s current state. This helped van Halteren create a better and faster insight into their process and quality data and is helping to spot quality-affecting factors quicker during production by the operator. After production, it helps the process engineer analyse data in a fraction of the time it took before, increasing the likelihood of finding causes of problems and quality variations.