About ConDoor

ConDoor Door Solutions is a leading producer of insulated overhead doors for commercial and residential buildings. The company has three production sites in The Netherlands and Hungary, where 175 employees work daily on the development of tailor-made sustainable doors — translating the wishes of their customers into high-quality products.

logo_condoor_Synadia

Over the years Synadia developed a solid partnership with the ConDoor, it is based upon trust, transparency and expertise. Together we are working as a team on technical solutions that help ConDoor be best in class in their industry”

Remi van Wijngaarden

Commercial Director Synadia

The challenge

ConDoor offers a wide range of doors with customized dimensions for every door size (up to 12 meters) in more than 40 countries. Sometimes there are disputes with customers about damages (scratches or dents) on delivered doors. There was no way to tell whether the damages occurred during the production process, during shipping or at the customer’s location. A recall is an expensive exercise and resulted in a net loss.

The challenge was to enable ConDoor to prove to its customers that during assembly the door was in great condition or, be able to initiate a recall without going into a dispute with the customer.

Standards in regards to defect detection were sat quite high:

  • Ability to detect dents of 10mm+
  • Ability to detect scratches of 2mm+
  • Ability to detect paint level inconsistency in areas of 10mm+

Alongside with software challenges (create QA portal, write local software for cameras and handheld devices) Synadia had to address a number of environmental challenges (dust, heat, cold, cleaning process and, most importantly, lack of day-light).

Technical challenges we also remarkable:

  • Ability to capture QA evidence in near-real-time (10.000+ images a day);
  • Ability to take ultra-high resolution images (3000 x 41666) of 12 meter panels (900 x 12000 mm);
  • Ability to store 3 TB+ of QA evidence each month;
  • Ability to retrieve QA evidence (less than 6 months old) in real-time.

Hardware & connectivity challenges were not new:

  • ConDoor did not want to invest further into their local hardware and the challenge to build software which would not impact available hardware capacity had laid on Synadia’s shoulders.

Implementation summary of benefits

Synadia made it possible and enabled ConDoor to prove to their customers that doors are in great condition during assembly or, where applicable, enabled initiation of recall procedure without going into lengthy disputes. This project took the necessary step in bringing ConDoor closer to AWS cloud.

  • Simplicity

  • No capital investments

  • Enhanced business productivity

  • Operational cost-efficiency

Why we choose AWS?

ConDoor already chose AWS that is why it was already known that all necessary building blocks for this project are available, the need to search for an alternative in another place was not even discussed.

The AWS cloud was ideal for this challenge since it has offered nearly out of the box an easy way to securely register and remotely manage,  organize, monitor IoT devices (imaging PCs) which played a key role in the image acquisition process.

Additionally,  inexpensive compute and storage, ability to back up and archive easily, native support for Infrastructure as Code confirmed that AWS had everything that was needed.

We chose Amazon Web Services because it enabled us to achieve what we wanted without deeply investing further into our local hardware”

Customer…

Commercial Director Synadia

Why Synadia

ConDoor and Synadia are good partners, please refer to the “Bending machine” and “Smart Factory software” case studies which will reveal all necessary details which depict the history of our previous relationship and cooperation. It was an absolute pleasure for Synadia to further help when ConDoor addressed Synadaia with a new set of complex challenges in regards to quality assurance.

The main contributing factors were:

  • Proven by time trust relationship between companies
  • Success in previous projects
  • Knowledge and deep understanding of ConDoor business
  • Lack of bureaucracy and agility
  • Simplicity and transparency

Discover the solution created by Synadia

Synadia had to tackle challenges one by one:

  1. The production line was equipped with multiple ultra-high resolution  industrial cameras;
  2. Light conditions were changed to high-frequency LED lamps;
  3. Local software for handheld devices and cameras was provided and configured (as barcodes of quality inspection objects are scanned, images are taken, cropped, stitched together and stored in S3).  
  4. A web portal was created in the AWS Cloud and could be used to respond to quality complaints.

In this case Synadia built a three-tier solution in Ireland. VPC is spanned across three availability zones. Route 53 serves application requests and forwards them to CloudFront with Elastic Load Balancer serving as the origin. Elastic Load Balancer distributes requests across all zones based on the health of resources forming Web & Application layer.

Instead of classic EC2, Synadia used ECS Fargate clusters for Web & Application layer for this project. 

Redis ElastiCache was placed between Application and Database layers improving the performance of the solution by storing frequently accessed data items in memory, so that these items are retrieved without the need to query the database layer.

ConDoor QA LLD

All infrastructure was deployed as code by Terraform using SSM to store all parameters necessary for the deployment job. S3 was used to store images, logs and Terraform state, SNS was used for notification purposes.

The list of key services includes: CloudWatch, EC2, ElastiCache, Application Load Balancer, Key Management Service, Relational Database Service (Aurora Aurora PostgreSQL), SSM Parameter Store, S3, ECS Container Service, VPC, Route 53, CloudFront, AWS IoT Core, and ECR Container Registry (ECR).

The solution was implemented in accordance with AWS well-architected framework and as a result of that:

  • ‍Secure
  • Reliable
  • Performant and efficient
  • Cost Optimized

The complexity of relationships between AWS building blocks is depicted in the diagram above.

ConDoor QA HLD

Synadia handled this challenge very well and enabled us to prove to our customers that doors were in great condition during assembly or, where applicable, enabled us to initiate a recall without going into a dispute with the customer”

Customer

Commercial Director Synadia

Results

The solution runs in AWS cloud and uses absolute minimum hardware on-premises (cameras and imaging PCs) in a manufacturing factory in Zeewolde. Having used integrated with GitHub AWS CodePipeline in combination with Terraform, Synadia was able to utilize the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach to provide fully automated deployments using DevOps method.

When necessary, it is possible now to spin up the exact replica of the solution, perform needed tests, create lessons learned log and shut the environment down to save costs. If necessary, it is possible to deploy this solution in another region within a few hours rather than weeks.

The provided solution does not require additional human resources for operational activities. Due to serverless building blocks, it is simply not necessary to maintain compute, storage and database infrastructure elements – it is all done by AWS as part of provided service.

The solution provided resolves all challenges, namely:

High standards in regards to defect detection were met:

  • To sharply see 2 mm elements on the picture it is required to have a density of 0,3 mm/pixel resolution. In this way, 2 mm2 on the picture will be backed by 36 physical pixels.

Software challenges were resolved:

  • Portal, which ConDoor can use to respond to quality claims, was created; 
  • Local software for cameras and handheld devices was provided;
  • AWS Lambda functions are used for image adjustment purposes.

Environmental challenges were resolved:

  • Dustproof hardware was used;
  • Industrial grade hardware is able to tolerate heat radiating from infra-red heaters in winters or operate stably during hot summers.
  • Lack of day-light was resolved by switching to high-frequency LED lamps.

Technical challenges were easy to tackle with AWS help:

  • QA evidence is gathered by local hardware which is presented to AWS cloud as IoT Devices;
  • QA evidence is being stored in S3 where the total volume of data and number of images is unlimited.
  • Amazon S3 Glacier was used as a secure, durable, and low-cost cloud storage for data archiving.

Synadia eliminated all existing challenges without the need to expand compute capacity in our private cloud”

Customer

Commercial Director Synadia

Benefits

Simplicity

The solution is very simple and does not require any special knowledge or training. By a simply scanning a barcode on a panel our solution automatically acquires an image and stores it in the cloud.

No capital investments

ConDoor did not have to heavily invest in local hardware and provision for further growth. The solution had no impact on ConDoor’s existing private cloud.

Enhanced business productivity

Financial losses caused by the absence of a quality assurance process are eliminated, lengthy customer disputes are in the past, now ConDoor uses their time and resources more efficiently, all of this enables ConDoor to do more with less.

Operational cost-efficiency

Due to serverless building blocks used, operational costs for the quality assurance solution are mostly inexpensive S3 storage and internet connectivity.

Discover the next steps

This project is just a  first step in a much bigger programme which Synadia executes for ConDoor –  Smart Factory 2.0.

In the next project Synadia will evaluate the efficiency of other manufacturing processes and will enhance them to the max by removing the need to print and perform manual activities. 

This is how Synadia sees ConDoor in the near future: “All tasks in every process are well organized, sequenced and controlled. “Stacks of paper” and “manual checklists” are history. The planning department and people on the floor work in harmony. Workflows are transparent and can be tracked in real-time on monitoring screens. ConDoor has become a “green” company that reduced the carbon footprint.”

Configuration of the Medmaster by Synadia

About Synadia Software

Synadia is ACE eligible Select Consulting Partner founded in 2016 with a strong focus on serverless, IoT and industrial cloud solutions. Synadia is a young, ambitious and innovative company which firmly believes nothing is impossible. 

The Synadia explorers use innovation to create new opportunities. To allow things to happen which their clients never thought possible before. Synadia’s ambition is to get advanced partner status next year. Synadia practices DevOps and Continuous Delivery in every project they do. 

Discover the ConDoor functionalities created by Synadia