Innovation and sustainability in operational processes

Welcome to Fueling the future with Rob IJpelaar, Director of Operations at Peblar. We speak to Rob about innovation and sustainability in the Operational Processes

How do you continue to innovate and improve operational processes? 

I think it's very important, innovation in our production environment. Of course it's really important also to have a stable production and not change too much and every change should be controlled very well. But we are continuously looking at improvements of our production environment to gain more product reliability and even a more stable output.

For instance, we're working on automatic visual inspections with algorithms, checking our product, making sure that all the cables are routed well, that all the components are present and those algorithms are like self-learning and I think that really has a nice showcase of innovation in a production environment and besides that we also have a dedicated group at Prodrive Technologies working on the future of the factory and they are busy with kind of new techniques and innovations and investigating things like AI, that's a very hot topic at the moment, and how we can apply that to our production environment.

How does Peblar factor sustainability into the process?

It's extremely important actually. So it's really important to be sustainable. It's easily said, but it's a whole process. So we also have a sustainability program running at ProDrive to make our product more and more sustainable, and also we produce everything in-house in a very compact footprint.

So we have, for instance, the plastics, we have the injection moulding in-house, very close to our assembly line. So we minimise the transportation and also we have suppliers really around us that are close by and that provide materials just in time.

So I think that that's really contributing to sustainability And when looking at a product level, we also did a lifecycle assessment where we came up with initiatives to reduce the size of the box. Also within the requirements of course and the limitations that we have to reduce the waste, to reduce paper, but also we're looking into reducing the amount of plastic in our box. And that's a continuous process, ongoing and will not stop, but there's a lot of focus.

What operational goals are you working towards?

So, we are really excited about the future, so at the moment we are outlined to produce over 150 Ks per year out of our factory of product technologies.

With those numbers, we are actually continuously looking to improve our operations and really achieve operational excellence.