MTConnect and Memex Support Legacy Machine Connectivity E-mail Clarification

Dave Edstrom, President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute, has requested that we clarify an earlier email where we stated, “A significant announcement at the show was the industry consortium, MTConnect, asked Memex to co-chair the Legacy Machine Tool Connectivity Working Group to develop industry standards, effectively endorsing our product direction.”

Dave Edstrom stated, “We are thrilled that David McPhail is the Co-Chair, with John Turner, of the new Legacy Machine Tool Connectivity Working Group. It is imperative that everyone understands that the MTConnect Institute has never and will never endorse any company, organization or set of products. This is why I asked Memex Automation to send out this clarification.”

OEE in Process or Discrete Manufacturing

The Process manufacturing sector has been way ahead of the rest of manufacturing in adopting and using efficiency metrics, all for a good reason. Discrete manufacturing has not been able to adopt metrics easily in the past and we now have a cost effective solution that can be of huge advantage to companies.

The simple logic here is the Process manufacturing sector, characterized by chemical changes in product often in a continuous environment (eg. Refinery), is very capital intensive using process control MES systems that capture all this information, so it is then easy to report on the metrics. Typically multi-million dollar project implementations, all part of the initial machine deployment.

Discrete (CNC and many other types) on the other hand, which are characterized by making individual parts, have not needed the sophisticated MES controls and could not justify the very expensive implementations of $10,000 to $millions per machine, so they have not done much in the OEE metric area. Up until now, and primarily because of our product, we have brought the price point down to the $4,000 per machine level – which is now cost effective and justifiable. The benefits of 20% or more productivity (our customers say it is much more) pay for this system very quickly.

And we can make this an “Operator-less” input – meaning we pick up signals right from the machine and there is no need for an operator to give some input, unless required for reject or downtime reason codes. We are hearing from our customers that this is very important – you can just imagine all the reasons. Many ERP and other solutions just about all require operator input (bar-code scanning etc.) and this is old thinking and often problematic with operator productivity, errors and even hand writing on a clipboard for entry days later. Our real-time, direct connection is most accurate and saves much labor time – often justifying the hard direct expense in itself, let alone the benefits of increased efficiency, lower product costs and competitive advantage.

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Customer Perspective on Benefits of OEE

There is always interesting new benefits of OEE from a customer perspective especially as it relates to a positive experience for operators and people on the shop floor. A recent interview dug up these golden nuggets:

“We now have a tool to communicate to the people on the shop floor that our performance can improve.”

“The OEE data provided improves human as well as machine-to-machine communications.”

“We believe we can use Memex data to motivate employees with a shared understanding of how we can be more productive, and that’s what it’s all about.”

“Our biggest differentiator is productivity and OEE helps us identify areas to improve our efficiency.”

“Machines are islands of unconnected information – like having a group of office PCs, each with different software – now we can network machines together, just like networking an office.”

“We had passive OEE with manual clip boards and now we have active OEE, visible in the plant.”

“The key to better productivity is not just to track performance, but to act on problems in real-time.”

“Machine connectivity unites the islands of machine automation, establishing a fully-connected, enterprise-wide manufacturing nervous system that gives real-time visibility of production and the ability to adapt and control each machine.”

“Customers can see and believe in what we’re doing to improve on time delivery because we have traceability of machine operations through OEE.”

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Memex Sells its Products Globally

As an international company, Memex sells its products to customers all around the world.  From Australia, Thailand, Korea, Mexico, Turkey, the Middle East, South America, Africa, Europe and of course North America customers utilize Memex Automation products.

Our memory upgrades are in high demand and in some cases for certain machines we are the only supplier in the world. The Memex connectivity tools bringing machines onto the corporate network are highly useful, and coupled with our machine monitoring capabilities we offer exceptional increases in productivity to make our customers more efficient in manufacturing. With over 250 dealers and a strong internal support network, backed by a full warranty, Memex is dedicated to ensuring successful deployment of machine tool utilities.

See us at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago, September 13-18, 2010, booth E-3868.

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Memex Automation participating at IMTS since 1992

Memex Automation invites you to meet us at IMTS 2010, at our booth in the Automation Center, East Building.
Memex is participating at IMTS, as it has for the last 18 years, since 1992, in Chicago for September 13-18, 2010, booth number E-3868 at McCormick Place.

Memex has a medium sixe 20 ft by 20 ft booth and is showcasing it’s advanced OEE+DNC software, Ax9150 Universal Machine Interface, Mx1053 Universal Network Interface for Serial to Ethernet communications and Ax2200 HS-FS File Server hardware.