Manufacturing Software
with mobile access to supervise and control from anywhere at any time.”
Shops today are looking to use advanced shop floor manage- ment to unite production and planning as closely as possible, Gruber said. “Near-zero downtime and worry-free productivity is the motto—no standstill and no equipment failure,” he said. “With the right shop-floor management technology, machines can report themselves when they come to an ‘abnormal condi- tion,’ then we can take the right precautions at the right time to quickly eliminate wastes and errors. They are looking for software that crunches big data in real time, and one that uses complex event processing and in- memory technology and the power of the cloud to gather and process information in real time to accelerate shop-floor performance.” Such systems can dis- play shop-floor performance indicators such as OEE for any factory in any location or time zone in the world and in the right language, Gruber added, and that data can be displayed on the Web and on mobile or shop-floor displays, in a world-class shop-floor man- agement system. “Forcam’s
FOCAS for FANUC, THINC for Okuma, OPC-UA and OPC- DA for PLCs, and many other drivers for Haas, Heidenhain, Siemens, and Allen-Bradley.” With Forcam’s Factory FrameWork software, users get more than just a management tool, he added. “It is a system and a philosophy that the whole team, from shop-floor workers and supervisors to senior managers, can employ to create a more productive, competitive, secure and profitable business,” Gruber said. “This is a rational response to the challenges from globalized manufacturing that can create a sustain- able competitive advan- tage for manufacturing in advanced economies.”
Image courtesy Wintriss Controls
With Wintriss Controls’ ShopFloorConnect Machine Interface (SMI), manufacturers get an easy-to-use touchscreen interface that links with the company’s ShopFloorConnect data-monitoring software.
technology offers a machine data-collection engine with seam- less integration with all machines, regardless of the manufac- turer, control type or age of the machine,” said Gruber. The MTConnect protocol has successfully emerged as a standard machine interface protocol that has been widely distributed in North America and some industry leaders in Europe, including Forcam, have begun to globally use this royalty-free standard, Gruber noted. “MTConnect standard- izes links between systems, applications, and entire factories with each other to provide an integrated overall manufactur- ing system. In addition to MTConnect, Forcam’s technology supports a variety of real-time plug-ins to machine CNCs and PLCs, including manufacturer-specific drivers such as
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | October 2014
Tracking Tooling Data Another critical piece of shop-floor data manage- ment is the ability to track manufacturers’ tooling usage, and new systems are available to help manu- facturers view and access digital tooling data rather than using outmoded paper documentation. “A trend we see is the focus on the en- tire tool lifecycle,” said Dan- iel Speidel, director of sales, TDM Systems (Schaum- burg, IL). “TDM Systems’ Tool Lifecycle Management
[TLM] solution is the IT strategy for production resources and includes tool organization in all phases of planning, simula- tion, order preparation and production. In doing so, TDM-TLM is a link between ERP, PLM and MES, and it ensures commu- nication between planning and production systems.” TLM involves not just capturing and providing tool data and tool graphics in CAM and simulation processes, but it also includes the physical organization of tool circulation on the shop floor. “TDM-TLM is not oriented towards individual departments and single processes, but rather it consists of continuous communication and data exchange between the involved systems,” he said. “In today’s environment, manufac- turers are looking for transparency in the tooling data needed
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