Background
Our products are built on a history of industry leadership dating back to the early 1960s when we developed the first commercial Hot Isostatic Press (HIP). Today, Quintus’s technological innovations have expanded HIP-processing parameters to encompass greater pressures, higher temperatures, with unmatched control, and growing capacities. We develop products from research and small-volume HIP-presses to the world’s largest HIP production systems.
Hot Isostatic Presses employ pressurized heated gas for consolidation, densification, or bonding of high-performance components and materials. Processed parts can achieve 100% of maximum theoretical density, resulting in exceptional resistance to fatigue, impact, wear and abrasion. The products from the presses are used in a wide range of industries, with applications ranging from plane bodies, aviation engines, car engines, human-body implants, to critical components used in oil and gas. To obtain superior and reliable material properties the HIP operates under extreme conditions with pressures reaching up to 3100 bar and temperatures of 3000°C. The combination of such extreme conditions and vessel sizes reaching more than 2 meters in diameter and more than 4 meters in height results in massive amounts of stored energy. In fact, at these temperatures and pressures the ideal gas law no longer applies!
Task Description
Our presses are complex machines which represents a large investment and are often mission-critical for our customers. They typically are used for decades once in production, if maintained properly. The maintenance, however, involves changing wear parts, and sometime spare parts are required to fix a broken press. Quintus also offers the Quintus Care support program which includes providing suitable spare and wear parts even at the customer site, so called consignment stock, to reduce the lead-times (e.g., for delivery) when a machine part needs to be replaced. Today, much of the handling is done trough Excel sheets and manual procedures.
We have introduced the Quintus Portal as a way to digitally server our customers including cloud-connect presses (IoT devices) with the possibility to use advanced sensors and artificial intelligence to do predictive maintenance. We have also recently switched to a state-of-the-art ERP system (Dynamics 365) with integration to our PDM system. Hence, we have the data needed to do more advanced spare/wear part analytics.
The task is to analyse how an efficient spare and wear parts sales and logistics can be implemented in the Quintus Portal given the information available. It should preferably be a “web shop” where the customers can see all the valid parts for their particular press in a structured/logical way and be given a tailored price prior to an online purchase.
The thesis includes making a prototype implementation which also includes algorithms to calculate the part usage, ordering points and consignment stock levels for items. In short, what spare/wear parts are offered for a particular customer press, in what way are they best presented in the Quintus Portal, what will be the customer’s price for a “basket” of items (price calculation is typically done in the ERP system), how is the order placed automatically, how do we calculate automatic ordering points for maintenance and consignment stock, how do we integrate with existing computer systems (e.g., ERP) etcetera.
The thesis will give a clear view of how to digitalize the spare and wear parts handling world-wide for the company. At your disposal, you will have the expertise and press knowledge within Quintus.
Suitable Background
Master of Science program in Computer Science or similar
Application Information
The thesis will take place at Quintus’s office in Västerås during spring 2024 and is aimed for one or two persons. Apply as soon as possible, but no later than 2023-11-03. Send your CV together with academic transcripts to HR Business Partner, Stina Sjögren, recruitment@quintusteam.com
