Perfection is also a process

As one of the worlds leading luxury watch brands, IWC manufactures wristwatches that unite artful engineering and precision with an exclusive design. The company currently employs around 750 people at its two production sites in Schaffhausen and Merishausertal, where Swiss luxury watches are assembled to the highest quality standards by trained experts. In total, 1274 employees work for the company worldwide.

All the cogs at the IWC production facility have been seamlessly intermeshed since 1868. Every watch is individually assembled by one of the watchmakers. With a trained eye, dexterity and precision instruments, they put together several hundred individual parts to create a wristwatch. The fascination with the Schaffhausen brand is attributable, among other things, to the fact that every single process step for producing the movement features and sophisticated functions, such as the minute repeater, the tourbillon and the perpetual calendar, is performed by hand with greater precision than any machine could ever achieve.

Perfection is the aspiration to which IWC strives – and not only the watchmakers work towards this goal with the utmost concentration and accuracy, but also the EOL inspectors, who find and eliminate even the smallest of flaws in a comprehensive quality assurance process. Despite all the care that is taken, occasionally one of the luxury watches has to be reworked to meet the customers‘ demands without any compromises whatsoever.

To make the process chain even more efficient, IWC sought a software that combines CAQ (Computer Aided Quality) and an MES (Manufacturing Execution System). The solution was to be used in all the manufacturing steps from the production and final assembly, through to the EOL inspection. During the design phase and a project workshop with SCIIL, all the tools and processes were therefore examined from the ground up. Only after this had happened could the actual solution take shape. Suggestions for optimizations from the employees were also recorded and taken into consideration. Developed in just 6 months, since its introduction the system has been running stably in the areas final assembly (marriage of the movement and the case), final inspection (function and aspect test), reworking (repairs), as well as for the process control and data analysis.

Advantages and benefits: alleviation and shorter processing times. The new digital process with its intuitive operability has greatly shortened training times for the employees. The data quality has also been improved, both with regard to data errors for faster cleansing, as well as for reworking, conclusions and improvements. Errors are found more easily and fixed more quickly, and the processing times have been substantially improved. The bottom line is an enormous gain in efficiency for IWC – and another huge step towards absolute perfection.

At long last, we wanted ONE solution for ALL the production steps. The Excel lists, help sheets and island solutions that had been used previously should be replaced. This would enable the planning, recording and steering of the quality inspections, errors and reworking, and also safeguard traceability back to the supplier. Other issues concerned data collection, and the automatic extraction of reports and key figures  from the system.