Tischlerei Mario Gießelbach is a small carpentry business located in Germany, that provides furniture and other creations out of wood. Their mission is to create a reusable, muti-functional and reassemblable shelf that is sustainable at the same time. Tischlerei Mario Gießelbach is trying to follow the trend of sustainability in the furniture business while comming up with its own, unique solution that tries to give the customer as much options as possible to fit every man’s demands.Due to our client being a Siemens Software Partner it was clear, that using a Siemens Low Code Paltform would stand in the foreground, because we could rely on important values such as easy access, a variety of tools and help if required. For the creation of a 'Digital Twin Solution of the flexible Shelf ’ we have been supervised by Volker Bremers, a partner of our Client Mario Gießelbach. The owner of Tischlerei Mario Gießelbach and had been supported during our development by Tyani Tian (Business Partner & Technical Trainer - Mendix Academy )
Table of Contents
Project Members
- Ben Dunlop (Scrum Master; UTS)
- Christian Schaaf (Product Owner; HTW)
- Ellis Reschke (Business Engineer; HTW)
- Brodie Hurrell (Business Engineer; UTS)
Problem Statement
Nowadays, bids like sustainability and resource conservation became very valuable amongst businesses and customers. Clients express the demand of sustainable furniture and companies have to come up with solutions to fit their demands. Yet it is very importnat to guarantee a long lasting product life cycle and at best to be able to reuse the product.
Project Idea & Vision
Like perviously said, customers express more and more demands for sustainable furniture. Mario tried to fit that demands by coming up with a sustainable and multi-usable shelf based on two different-sized pieces of wood.
The idea is to be able to expand or decrease the size of the shelf and parallelly change the structure inside the shelf, adding bigger and smaller gaps inside.
That gives the customer the possibility to buy a shelf but yet, by adding some pieces, to create a whole new object just by rearranging and reassembling the pieces.
Herefore we used a variaty of Tools during our development:
- Siemens NX (CAD-Software )
- Siemens Mendix (Lowcode platform)
- Dropbox (Cloud storage Platform)
Project Target
Our goal is to provide our customers a shelf, that covers the most used sizes in households and on top of that provides a variaty of design options for the inside of the shelf. The superior aim, is to distrbute as many configurations and options for the customer to ideally fit everyones demands.
Solution
There are several key. Factors we came up during our development process.
Beforehand is important to say, that the shole shelf is based on just two different-sized pieces- A “Long board” & “Short Board”
The four main assembly rules we have to be aware of, are:
- At every intersection of colinear pieces there must be a perpendicular piece in between
- Each corner on the outer frame must feature a short piece
- Long pieces can only connect to another long piece at the midpoint
- To create a larger square gap (2x2) the shelf requires a minimum height or length of four square gaps
On top of that, there are factors like the avarage hight of a flat that we have to take into account, so we can ot exceed certain parameteres with our shelfes for regular customers. But we still intergrated a “Custom demand” for our clients to be able to view their special wishes and trying to provide individual solutions.
Architecture
Architecture of the Configurator
To demonstrate how our configurator works and how the backlog of the website is actually functioning, it is important to take a look at the following image. The User is required to authentificate themself in the beginning to able to access saved data. Later on, throug the process of the customization, a variety of CAD-Files is stored in the backlog, so after every possible design sits a pre-made CAD-configuration of the shelf.
The whole process while surfing on the website is triggered through so called “Microflows”, which direct the user to the next checkpoint, after fulfilling certain criteria. If those aren’t fully fulfilled, an error will occur.
User Interface of the final Product
-
Homepage
By accessing the Homepage and clicking the button Shelf Configurator you will be redirected to the actual configurator where the actual process is taking place. The button Job Board on this occasion is only visible to the Administator.
-
First level of customization
Having been redirected, the design process starts. By pressing the dropdown menu of the parameters Lenght and Hight you get to choose from a certain amount of lengths given in Centimeters. Both values entered,it generates a shelf image in the field right to it.Parallelly you can choose what colour the boards would like to be, by clicking the drop-down Colours
-
Second level of customization
In the second level, you get to choose one of four given customizations and afterwards the different amounts of coloured boards you want to order as a customer. Therefore, you have to select unter the valueble Colour the option Multiple Colours.
In the end, you will be provided a BOM of all the different coloured pieces you selected.
By pressing save and next you will be directed to the Order Summary where you can overview your order one last time and pay for it or save it for later.
- Administator
Having payed for the order, the Administrator now can access the orders thorugh the button Job Board in his interface. There he as an overview of the incoming orders and the ones in progress plus the done ones.
Conclusion
Overall, the project showed us the importance of using a Digital Twin in the real world. Furthermore it has been a nice challenge for our group, to teach ourselfs many new things from scratch and working with the gained knowlegde. All in All, it has been eye-opening to see the importance and possibilities this technology is opening for different fields, not just for our project. It can be said, that a Digital Twin is indeed a big contribution towards the tranformation into industry 4.0.
Future Improvements
Future Improvements could be seen in the interface of the App, to make it accessible to a bigger variety of people around the globe. Also a more user-friendly UI would attract more potential customers. Therefore th ergonomics could be improved and add features as speech, to be able to target e.g. dissabled people too.
By implementing a 3D-viewer which could be feeded by CAD-Data in the back-ground it would be easier to get a better imagination and view of the product, instead of just showing pictures. The customer could actually get a live and 360-degree view of the product. Also adding real-time updated like colour and different configurations would be a nice addition.
Adding a Payment provider, which covers the majority of payment- methods would also be a huge benefit, to automatize the whole process and make it smoother for the Administrator.
Customizing the Job Board further would also drive it forward, because the more user-friendly and better it gets to handle., the more people in the company can use it, therefore the Processing time could be decreased.
Appendix
Glossary
- BOM: Bill of Materials
- Digital Twin: digital representation of a tangible or intangible object from the real world in the digital world. Whether it is available or not in the real worlds, doesn’t matter on this occasion.
- CAD: Computer Aided Design. Creation of Design with the help of a Computer.
- UI: User Interface.
Tischlerei Mario Gießelbach is a small carpentry business located in Germany, that provides furniture and other creations out of wood. Their mission is to create a reusable, muti-functional and reassemblable shelf that is sustainable at the same time. Tischlerei Mario Gießelbach is trying to follow the trend of sustainability in the furniture business while comming up with its own, unique solution that tries to give the customer as much options as possible to fit every man’s demands.Due to our client being a Siemens Software Partner it was clear, that using a Siemens Low Code Paltform would stand in the foreground, because we could rely on important values such as easy access, a variety of tools and help if required. For the creation of a 'Digital Twin Solution of the flexible Shelf ’ we have been supervised by Volker Bremers, a partner of our Client Mario Gießelbach. The owner of Tischlerei Mario Gießelbach and had been supported during our development by Tyani Tian (Business Partner & Technical Trainer - Mendix Academy )
Table of Contents
Project Members
Problem Statement
Nowadays, bids like sustainability and resource conservation became very valuable amongst businesses and customers. Clients express the demand of sustainable furniture and companies have to come up with solutions to fit their demands. Yet it is very importnat to guarantee a long lasting product life cycle and at best to be able to reuse the product.
Project Idea & Vision
Like perviously said, customers express more and more demands for sustainable furniture. Mario tried to fit that demands by coming up with a sustainable and multi-usable shelf based on two different-sized pieces of wood.
The idea is to be able to expand or decrease the size of the shelf and parallelly change the structure inside the shelf, adding bigger and smaller gaps inside.
That gives the customer the possibility to buy a shelf but yet, by adding some pieces, to create a whole new object just by rearranging and reassembling the pieces.
Technical Tools
Herefore we used a variaty of Tools during our development:
Project Target
Our goal is to provide our customers a shelf, that covers the most used sizes in households and on top of that provides a variaty of design options for the inside of the shelf. The superior aim, is to distrbute as many configurations and options for the customer to ideally fit everyones demands.
Solution
There are several key. Factors we came up during our development process.
Beforehand is important to say, that the shole shelf is based on just two different-sized pieces- A “Long board” & “Short Board”
The four main assembly rules we have to be aware of, are:
On top of that, there are factors like the avarage hight of a flat that we have to take into account, so we can ot exceed certain parameteres with our shelfes for regular customers. But we still intergrated a “Custom demand” for our clients to be able to view their special wishes and trying to provide individual solutions.
Architecture
Architecture of the Configurator
To demonstrate how our configurator works and how the backlog of the website is actually functioning, it is important to take a look at the following image. The User is required to authentificate themself in the beginning to able to access saved data. Later on, throug the process of the customization, a variety of CAD-Files is stored in the backlog, so after every possible design sits a pre-made CAD-configuration of the shelf.
The whole process while surfing on the website is triggered through so called “Microflows”, which direct the user to the next checkpoint, after fulfilling certain criteria. If those aren’t fully fulfilled, an error will occur.
User Interface of the final Product
Homepage
By accessing the Homepage and clicking the button
Shelf Configuratoryou will be redirected to the actual configurator where the actual process is taking place. The buttonJob Boardon this occasion is only visible to the Administator.First level of customization
Having been redirected, the design process starts. By pressing the dropdown menu of the parameters
LenghtandHightyou get to choose from a certain amount of lengths given in Centimeters. Both values entered,it generates a shelf image in the field right to it.Parallelly you can choose what colour the boards would like to be, by clicking the drop-downColoursSecond level of customization
In the second level, you get to choose one of four given customizations and afterwards the different amounts of coloured boards you want to order as a customer. Therefore, you have to select unter the valueble
Colourthe optionMultiple Colours.In the end, you will be provided a BOM of all the different coloured pieces you selected.
By pressing
saveandnextyou will be directed to the Order Summary where you can overview your order one last time and pay for it or save it for later.Having payed for the order, the Administrator now can access the orders thorugh the button
Job Boardin his interface. There he as an overview of the incoming orders and the ones in progress plus the done ones.Conclusion
Overall, the project showed us the importance of using a Digital Twin in the real world. Furthermore it has been a nice challenge for our group, to teach ourselfs many new things from scratch and working with the gained knowlegde. All in All, it has been eye-opening to see the importance and possibilities this technology is opening for different fields, not just for our project. It can be said, that a Digital Twin is indeed a big contribution towards the tranformation into industry 4.0.
Future Improvements
Future Improvements could be seen in the interface of the App, to make it accessible to a bigger variety of people around the globe. Also a more user-friendly UI would attract more potential customers. Therefore th ergonomics could be improved and add features as speech, to be able to target e.g. dissabled people too.
By implementing a 3D-viewer which could be feeded by CAD-Data in the back-ground it would be easier to get a better imagination and view of the product, instead of just showing pictures. The customer could actually get a live and 360-degree view of the product. Also adding real-time updated like colour and different configurations would be a nice addition.
Adding a Payment provider, which covers the majority of payment- methods would also be a huge benefit, to automatize the whole process and make it smoother for the Administrator.
Customizing the Job Board further would also drive it forward, because the more user-friendly and better it gets to handle., the more people in the company can use it, therefore the Processing time could be decreased.
Appendix
Glossary