Quality management and techniques in the wood industry

There are different production systems and techniques. Every company is unique in the industrial field and they have unique production systems. They use several same methods in their working from the 1950s. These methods' sources are inherited from Toyota (lean management, kaizen, 5S methods, kanban etc.) (Ohno 1988). These are standards nowadays. Considerable technological advances appeared in the industrial sector in last years. Developments are based on the " Internet of things" idea, it's called " Industrial Internet" in USA. In Germany, the " Industrie 4.0" project started in 2011. Many experts think this is the fourth industrial revolution, the version 4.0 comes from that idea. The goal of these projects is to create live connections among all industrial machines, tools and the central units. Some techniques and tools, e. g., sensors, big data, cloud computing, 3D printing, robotics and artificial intelligence, support the IT developments also. The decision making in the industry will be automated and quick because of the new methods and tools. In our research, we extended some of these guidelines. The production is the most important activity in the life of factories. The continuality of the production process must always be secured. However, it is not a trivial task. The systems' failures or the bad quality of the materials can always happen. We worked with a given company of the wood industry area. Its working is also unique, therefore we had to create a specialized, self-developed production system. The old solution was not so solid, it had a lot of disadvantages. The colour determination process was not exact. The process was tested several times with the same timber and we got different results of colour. The process did not deal with the failures of the timbers. Wood failures also have influence on colour. The colour determination software was not accessible for the wood company. It was able to access only by the informatics company, which is not exists now. Besides, the colour determination process was not " mistake-proofing". An operator was able to change some input parameters' value easily, which can be led us to the wrong decision of timbers' colour. These problems eventuate the need of a new development. Our system monitors the most important production progress, which is the determination of the timber's colour after shave of timbers. In the wood industry, the properties of timber are equivalent with the quality. Our solution has several functionalities: (1) database communication, (2) ERP communication, (3) controlling different devices of the production (e. g., camera, printers, sensors).