lifecycle. Mazak makes the MTConnect adapters available at a cost of $500 per machine, he said.
Employing shop-floor monitoring solutions gives manufac- turers a way to visualize what’s wrong with their processes, noted Ron Pieper, program manager, Viz Products, TechSolve Inc. (Cincinnati). With TechSolve’s MTConnect-compliant Web-based ShopViz monitoring application, users can easily see what ails a process on the factory floor. Pieper compares MTConnect with a mechanic using the On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) standard for automotive main- tenance. “When we hook up ShopViz to a machine, we really don’t care what kind of machine it is. You get the same data for the same reality,” Pieper said. “Say I drive an old Saturn, and you probably drive a newer Lexus or a Ford, when I hook up an OBD code scanner, it has the language it needs for communication. If we can apply this OBD concept to machine tools, we can truly learn what’s wrong with the process, and we can look for losses—I call them OEE detractors.”
Even with the tools available, a major impediment to opti- mizing processes is that so few shops use monitoring. “AMT has estimated that about 4% of machine tools out there are monitored,” Pieper said. “I believe that’s an over-estimation! There are a huge amount of machines in the small shops that are not monitored.” The number of machine tools being monitored is under 1%,
Pieper estimates, with that figure skewed toward larger manu- facturers that more likely have internally developed systems. “Because they can afford it, what they tend to do is to create their own monitoring systems,” he said of companies including Ford, Chrysler and GE.
Many machine tool builders such as Mazak, Mori-Seiki and Okuma have done a good job supporting MTConnect, and Makino Inc. (Mason, OH) is using an adapter that was co-written by TechSolve that will work with Makino’s Pro3 and Pro5 controls, he said. “MTConnect works easily with newer controls,” Pieper said. “One of the big trends is to have
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