At its Chasseneuil, France site, Schneider Electric expanded inspection from 5 critical areas with traditional methods to 17 areas using Cognex OneVision, reduced false bad rates by a factor of 70, reduced cycle time from 400 ms to 200 ms, and cut the integration time for new inspection applications by 30%. Cognex's case study says the combination of Cognex In-Sight cameras and the OneVision AI development environment doubled production yield. Christophe Ernis, Smart Operation Manager, Product Power Division, said: "OneVision gives the opportunity to create standards that can be replicated on all factories in the field of vision."
An earlier generation of vision tools was used for on-line inspections, primarily focused on assembly inspection and measurement. Schneider Electric needed to inspect more control points without slowing production, faced a scarcity of skilled vision engineers and increasing pressure to reduce manufacturing costs, and wanted to democratize AI for operators and plant engineers and to build centralized validated models replicable worldwide. The initiative came from engineers and operations leaders at the factory.
The team integrated OneVision and In-Sight cameras with the In-Sight Vision Suite, a unified environment for all In-Sight devices that combines traditional rule-based vision tools with an advanced AI toolset. The new setup covers 17 control areas, including height control, screw position and rotation validation, sorting, orientation detection, and detection of shortages at the base or head of contactors. In OneVision, engineers label images in detail, refine regions of interest and retrain models quickly, starting even from minimal image sets, and the PCs with high-performance graphics cards previously needed for advanced AI inspection are no longer required.
Schneider Electric ran a comprehensive security assessment of the cloud-based platform, with Cognex completing third-party security questionnaires and providing certifications. The broader testing and validation process spanned approximately six months, with much of the effort concentrated at the beginning on training, validation and operational reliability before full-scale deployment.
The site in France can develop inspection standards and refine a project that is then deployed to other facilities, since models can be trained, refined and distributed worldwide through the centralized platform. Cognex reports that quality and cost savings arrived at approximately twice the previous rate. The site now serves as a model for broader deployment, and Schneider Electric's stated goal is to expand the solution more widely across its global operations.