remote monitoring is like racing a Corvette in the 24 hours of LeMans without a dashboard,” Edstrom says. “Do you know more about your car than you do about your shop?” Among nearly two dozen key metrics to be derived from
shop-floor management systems, Edstrom listed OEE at the top, with others including asset utilization, diagnostics, statis- tical process control (SPC), jobs/lot tracking, cell man- agement, inspection probing, machine health prognostics, vibration monitoring, preven- tative maintenance, energy costs, anywhere-anytime access to plant-floor informa- tion, and data mining. Today’s manufacturing customers are looking for
a truly plug-and-play solution, Edstrom notes, which is what has been proposed with version 1.2 of MTConnect, a free, open-source protocol based on Internet standards including Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). “Think of MTConnect as the Bluetooth for manufacturing,” Edstrom ex- plains. “Essentially, it makes machine tools look like a Web site.”
A real-time view of machine status and OEE metrics is offered by Shop Floor Automations’ data-collection application for an aerospace customer.
In addition to actionable intelligence, machinists are looking for ease of use from their shop-floor data collec- tion and analysis solutions, adds Abbassian. “Manu- facturers are looking for easier-to-use solutions to the complex, real-world shop- floor data problems that they face,” he says. “For example, aerospace manufacturers are merging into larger multinationals, yet they have country- specific ITAR restrictions on certain part numbers and with foreign national em- ployees. We recently developed an ITAR verification process integrated within Predator PDM [document management] and Predator DNC [distributed NC] while simplifying the current process for the machinist.”
Some key features within version 10 of Predator MDC (Manufacturing Data Collection) include the flexibility to inte- grate any CNC machine, robot, PLC or person-based shop-floor manufacturing data into a unique knowledgebase for that manufacturer, he adds. The Preda- tor MDC offers the flexibility to present more than 25,000 different reports, charts, dashboards and slide shows, he says, and it can also be affordably inte- grated within a company’s ERP, MRP, MES and other business systems. Such data management systems can be a boon for manufacturers working to-