Thesis Work for The Intelligent LTB process

Job description

You will be a part of ABB Control Technologies in Västerås This unit manufactures and sells state-of-the art control systems mainly to Industrial and Utility customer's e.g. the Mining-, Metal-, Paper-, Oil-, Food & Beverage-, Pharma-, Infrastructure, Power Generation and Marine & Port Industries. We have a long tradition within this field which means also that we are selling both new control systems as well as refurbishment and spare parts to older customer installations and plants. This mix of selling both new and old control systems and products means that we need to have a professional Life Cycle Management regarding handling of products. One of the most vulnerable tasks is to plan and purchase electronic components that are integrated (mainly on circuit boards). The reason for that, and the situation is worsening over time, is that global component market demand is growing and changing (from industrial to end-user including consumer). This results in increasing lead times and obsolete components. We are often receiving EOL (End-Of-Life) announcements from our suppliers. This forces us to have a special process for LTB (Last Time Buy) meaning purchasing components for an end of life consumption. In order to tackle this problem we have to plan for purchasing and/or redesign our products getting less dependent of the critical components. We have today a well described process for that but since worsening this manual process very soon needs to be replaced by some kind of intelligent data system simply because the human brain could not handle this extremely complex situation.

Tasks:

Your task and the thesis work will be to 1) identify the most critical/complex sub processes in our existing LTB process 2) These sub processes we would like you to investigate the possibility making them “automatic” (better support from software tools) 3) Investigate if there are one system/SW on the market that might replace the complete or at least the most critical sub processes within the LTB process.

The output of the Thesis work should result in a number of recommendation to us at ABB Control Technologies in order to making our existing LTB process more effective and less dependent of manual work.

Requirements:

We want you to be process oriented as well as familiar or at least interested in solving problems with big data volumes. To be able to understand the existing LTB process you also need to be an experienced user of Excel (the LTB process data is stored in Excel files).
We welcome you to have good communication skills and the ability to questioning/challenging our existing LTB process.


• We believe the work best suited for a master thesis (30 ECTS) but might also suit a bachelor thesis (15 ECTS)
• The work could be performed by one or two students. We believe two students working as a team better suited for the task than one person
• We believe most of the task to be executed at our site in Västerås

Additional information

Recruiting Manager Jonas Krouthén, and/or our LTB expert Peter Jenåker, will answer your questions. Union representatives - Sveriges Ingenjörer: Joakim Olsson 021-342118, Unionen: Krista Andersson 021-340285. Positions are filled continuously. Apply with your CV, academic transcripts and a cover letter in English
Welcome to apply!

ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) is a pioneering technology leader in power grids, electrification products, industrial automation and robotics and motion, serving customers in utilities, industry and transport & infrastructure globally. Continuing a history of innovation spanning more than 130 years, ABB today is writing the future of industrial digitalization with two clear value propositions: bringing electricity from any power plant to any plug and automating industries from natural resources to finished products. As title partner in ABB Formula E, the fully electric international FIA motorsport class, ABB is pushing the boundaries of e-mobility to contribute to a sustainable future. ABB operates in more than 100 countries with about 147,000 employees. www.abb.com