SHOP-FLOOR DATA MANAGEMENT
“Forcam believes that the Smart Factory is about con- necting several dots,” Abuali said. “If the equation is balanced properly, it will lead to significant adoption by big and small shops alike.”
Abuali said a Forcam client, Richards Industries, has 150 em- ployees and 30 machines. “Richards Industries used to collect data manually on the shop floor until they selected Forcam” for managing shop-floor data. “They improved productivity by over 40% within six months” with a 250% return on its investment.
`Scalable’ Technology
5ME also is among the companies adapting its products to customer size and conditions. “That’s why we like to learn as much as we can about a
customer’s operations,” 5ME’s Tecos said. “The more we know, the more we can help dial in beneficial information and provide the real value that can transform a business…We get more feedback and requests for additional features and enhanced functionality.”
“This technology is scalable,” Tecos said. “Shops can start with the monitoring of a single machine—maybe a workhorse that generates a lot of revenue—and then expand as it makes sense…The cost of implementing Industry 4.0 solutions should not be an obstacle for small shops.” 5ME introduced Freedom 4.0, intended to complement Industry 4.0 systems. The application can be accessed from any device with a browser. It also supports the Association for Manufacturing Technology’s MTConnect standard. Many 5ME customers provide the company with access
to their Freedom 4.0 installations. 5ME deploys updates or upgrades remotely at mutually agreed upon times.
Also, “We are engaged in projects that involve machine
health, process health, predictive maintenance and interfac- ing with a variety of business systems within the manufactur- ing environment,” Tecos said.
Early Adopters At Memex, “We are no longer leading with the ‘how to do it,’ but rather the business benefits and outcomes re- garding the adoption of these concepts and technologies,” McPhail said. “We call this approach the ‘why should I do this’ approach, which establishes the business value right up front.”
The company’s target customers “are still in the early adopter phase, but those that get it are rapidly request- ing new innovative ways to consume and display the data collected,” he said. As a result, that “requires us to continually innovate to meet the demand,” McPhail said. “Constant innovation leads to dif- ferentiation, and differentiation is what we strive for.” One of Memex’s products is Merlin Tempus, which the company said provides metrics and analytical capabilities to pare downtime and increase production. Tempus received the 2016 Frost & Sullivan award for global machine monitor- ing leadership. “Tempus is our new IIoT platform of the future and is the culmination of three years of effort and several million dollars of investment,” McPhail said.
‘Now Mainstream’
“Both large and small shops are adopting this technology quickly and I think there is pressure on all shops to imple- ment this type of technology,” said Cimco’s Romanowski. “I think these types of systems are now main- stream.” According to Romanowski, “We
see more machines with MTCon- nect or another standard for data collection although these proto- cols have been available for many years. Customers now know they should make sure their machines are shipped with the data collection protocols installed.” The company released Cimco V8
Display generated by 5ME’s Freedom 4.0. 56
AdvancedManufacturing.org | April 2017 last year.
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