Memex Automation’s MERLIN to be showcased by Mazak as “value-added” solution at FABTECH

Finanzen, Germany – November 11, 2014

Memex Automation (CVE:OEE) says it has been invited by Mazak Optonics to jointly demonstrate its MERLIN manufacturing productivity product on Mazak’s laser cutting systems at FABTECH this year in Atlanta, Georgia. Mazak Optonics is the laser cutting systems division of Yamazaki Mazak Corp, and the third unit to demonstrate MERLIN as a “value-added MTConnect-based solution”, said Memex.

Memex’s MERLIN is a hardware and software tool that tracks a large number of data inputs that measure OEE [overall equipment effectiveness] in real-time, machine by machine, as well as other operational machine information. It enables customers to address production bottlenecks as they happen, converting idle time back into production and ultimately improving throughput and increasing income from plant operations.

MTConnect is the open, royalty-free standard that is used with Memex’s new CNC hardware adapters, bringing OEE network connectivity from the shop floor to management, no matter the make, model or vintage of machine.

“The implementation of MTConnect is one of the simplest and fastest ways to improve productivity and increase machine utilization,” said Mazak president Brian Papke.  “Mazak’s MTConnect implementation provided the highest ROI for any capital investment because of the significant increase in utilization of equipment for a very moderate expenditure.”

Papke personally drove the project to implement the MTConnect protocol to determine machine availability with maximum accuracy at his company’s Kentucky-based North American headquarters – an 800,000 sq.ft. complex that produces a variety of multi-axis turning and milling machines at a rate of 200 units per month. The company achieved a 42 percent increase in equipment utilization in its Kentucky plant as a result.

“The combination of MTConnect and MERLIN will deliver performance details including dashboards that open up tremendous real-time visibility for both individual machines and the entire shop floor,” added Mazak’s GM of sales support, Marc Lobit.

The FABTECH demonstration will take place at booth 3525 from November 11-13, the companies said, and will showcase MERLIN’s ability to connect all manufacturing machines to management, as well as report plant-wide capacity utilization and increase production and income from operations in real time.

FABTECH is North America’s largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event, and is expected to draw some 27,000 attendees this year. MERLIN was also showcased by Mazak at IMTS in September and at Germany’s EMO Hannover metalworking technology tradeshow last year.

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Your Data: Use It or Lose It

Canadian Industrial Machinery – November 11, 2014 – By Joe Thompson

Machine monitoring creates data that can be tracked and used to improve efficiency.

Data matters.

Whether it’s a production manufacturing operation or a job shop, measuring the effectiveness of each piece of shop floor equipment using overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) software and data collection tools enables companies to collect data in real time.

But it’s not enough just to collect data; it must be used to make positive change to operational activity.

By examining both real-time and historical data, manufacturers can make changes to the manufacturing process to optimize efficiency. This leads to a reduction in overall costs.

In many shops, machinists track machine usage using a paper form. At the end of each job, or at the end of the day, they write down how long the machine was running and how much time was spent on setup. This enables management to bill the correct amount of hours for a certain job.

While this can produce the information necessary to create an invoice, the results – when compared to the actual, measured data – can vary tremendously.

“I think shops would be very surprised by how much variance there is between their recorded uptime, for example, and the actual data,” explained David McPhail, president and CEO of Memex Automation, Burlington, Ont.

Memex Automation has developed technology that collects real-time OEE information no matter the make, model, or vintage of the machine tool and creates reports, also in real time, that companies can use to optimize manufacturing processes.

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MES Increases Machine Availability for Mazak

American Machinist – November 5, 2014

Mazak USA’s CNC machine assembly plant in Florence, KY, recently the site of an extensive expansion and process improvement program.

The American manufacturing renaissance is in motion at Mazak’s plant in Florence, Ky., with the help of MERLIN (Manufacturing Execution Real-time Lean Information Network), a manufacturing execution system (MES) and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications platform developed by Memex Automation that quickly and cost-effectively isolates productivity issues so everyone from the shop floor to the top floor is able to understand what must be done to maximize efficiency.

Mazak’s North American headquarters is an 800,000-sq.ft. complex producing a variety of multi-axis turning and milling machines at a rate of 200 units per month. The machine builder’s drive for productivity recently extended to a search to improve manufacturing efficiency, particularly regarding machine availability and associated downtime.

Mazak’s IT department started the efficiency drive by implementing the MTConnect protocol to determine machine availability with maximum accuracy, using Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) as a standard measurement. “This total embrace of MTConnect is intended to make a statement,” stated Mazak president Brian Papke, who personally drove the project. “We want to be a leader in both promoting and implementing MTConnect. We want our example to show the importance of moving toward data-driven manufacturing.  MTConnect is an essential part of what makes data-driven manufacturing possible.”

MTConnect is an open, royalty-free standard intended to foster greater interoperability between manufacturing devices and software applications. Introduced at IMTS 2008, Mazak executives recognized its potential to facilitate plant-wide integration and enhance automation.

Memex Automation’s Dave Edstrom, who was instrumental in creating the MTConnect vision in 2006, as well as was being the president and chairman of the MTConnect Institute for three-and-a-half years, joined Memex in January 2014 as its first chief technology officer and has worked with Mazak for years on MTConnect.

Ben Schawe, Mazak’s vice president of Manufacturing, began the hunt for a commercially available software package that could produce meaningful reports that would be actionable for both production and management teams.

Then, company formed a task force to evaluate commercially available software solutions. After an exhaustive search, Mazak selected MERLIN.   A 10-person evaluation committee of senior executives, including Brian Papke, unanimously chose the Memex Automation platform best capable of implementing the MTConnect vision.

“We ended up choosing MERLIN for its ability to collect data using MTConnect adapters and through their Universal Machine Interface circuit board for legacy machines,” Schawe explained.

“This advanced technology board can capture direct signals from the machine and translates it into MTConnect standard code,” he continued. “This combination meant that every machine on the shop floor could be MTConnect-compatible for a common technology analysis platform.

“In particular we liked MERLIN’s ability to display and report on information related to downtime and answer questions such as ‘Why is the machine not running and what can we do to get it running?’” Schawe said.

With MERLIN collecting and reporting Mazak’s production data in real-time, Mazak’s cross-functional task-force team had what they needed. Following the “you are what you measure” axiom, MERLIN made an almost instant impact at Mazak. A series of 60-in. display monitors presented real-time utilization data in a test section of the Florence plant. The test section contained a cross-section of equipment and helped establish a performance benchmark and related training protocols that could expand easily across the massive manufacturing plant.

Mazak’s large displays cycle through a series of reports that are viewable for short periods of time, using MERLIN. The majority of these reports focus on a specific machine as well as performance-based gauges and readouts, which resemble a car’s speedometer. Other reports present graphs that compare all of the machines connected to MERLIN according to a variety of critical metrics, such as uptime and stoppages by category.

For the first time, senior managers as well as everyone on Mazak’s shop floor have access to the same, actionable MERLIN reports. “Almost as soon as we had the reports out on the plant floor we saw a 6% increase in utilization,” Schawe said. “This was true low-hanging fruit. Not doing anything else – just having our operators aware of how their time management affected machine utilization – we got dramatic payback.”

MERLIN’s easily interpreted, visual report format provides operators at-a-glance information on how machine tool conditions are influencing efficiency. Bar graphs that summarize activity across a number of machines simultaneously inform supervisors and managers of trends useful for decision-making and long-term planning, such as when to schedule refresher training.

Also, MERLIN can show program stops, feed holds, spindle overrides, tool changes and other reasons why a machine is not running. Analyzing this data provides opportunities to reduce or eliminate many of these stoppages, which improves overall utilization.

A Mazak Slant Turn Nexus 600 big-bore turning center machine, with the MERLIN display screen at left.

At team production meetings Mazak personnel are able to identify and fix several downtime-related inefficiencies easily. One specific example indicated that some tools were wearing out frequently, and the simple solution was to have duplicates ready at tool magazines. This quick fix saved time because operators were no longer wandering the plant, enabling the machines to keep operating at peak capacity.

Some of Mazak’s analysis of MERLIN data was surprising, according to Schawe. In one instance, a number of part programs included optional stops, originally added so that operators could check tool-wear periodically, or measure a critical part feature during the prove-out phase.

When the part went into production, however, these optional stops were never removed from the part program, or operators simply got in the habit of restarting the machine at these points in the program. The high occurrence of stoppages linked to these programmed stops showed up in MERLIN reports, and were identified easily. Systematically editing the part programs to remove these unnecessary optional stops was an easy way to recover lost production time.

A similar pattern was detected in stoppages for tool changes. Some operators were stopping the machine every time the access to the tool magazine was opened to replace or check a cutting tool. Instead of using the feed-hold button, which stops the machine, they should have been using the magazine manual interrupt switch, which enables the machine to continue running safely while they perform tool maintenance. Training that addressed this issue took care of the problem.

Analyzing stoppages also revealed more subtle situations. For example, an unusual number of machine stops were reported with a certain run-of-part castings. Checking with the operators revealed that castings of the same part sourced from two different foundries were not identical. Dissimilarities in the foundry patterns created excess stock conditions that required the operator to interrupt the part program to manually add a second tool pass on the affected castings.

“Rather than offering an expensive, custom-built MES to go after specific issues, we’ve produced an affordable M2M toolkit that easily adapts to machines from all manufacturers and also produces a myriad of data reports our global customers find useful,” according to a Memex senior executive. “The technological breakthrough here is that MERLIN’s hardware and software module requires no programming or PLC set-up. MERLIN leverages every customer’s existing investment in plant, equipment and enterprise software, and lets them get on with the job of maximizing OEE.”

At Mazak, Schawe stated that MERLIN-related efforts to reduce downtime have so far yielded a 42% improvement in utilization for the monitored machines. In addition, his company reduced operator overtime by 100 hours per month and 400 hours per month of previously outsourced work was returned to Mazak.

He also praised the advantage of MERLIN’s ability to take the guesswork out of tracking machine utilization. “We can tell at a glance how we are doing, and the basis is in real-time and historical data,” he explained. “There is so much information, accurate and detailed, all easily accessed whereas before we were it was difficult to find information if it was even available,” he added.

Mazak’s HMI monitors present a series of reports for short periods, using MERLIN. Most of these reports focus on a specific machine as well as performance-based gauges and readouts, portrayed like speedometers. Other reports present graphs that compare all of the machines connected to MERLIN according to critical metrics, such as uptime and stoppages by category.

Rocky Rowland, production manager, uses the system to understand exact status of production. “I am a stickler for accurate information and we use it to make ongoing pro-active decisions in a real time basis.  As a bridge between management in the office administration and the actual shop floor, this tool helps me get things done and delivered on time,” he said.

Schawe’s management team also likes automatically receiving some 50 standard MERLIN reports that are sent out automatically to a variety of departments, cells, and managers on a daily, weekly and monthly basis through an email alert engine – including daily production, quality, constraints, throughput, operator and utilization metrics. “The data just flows,” he said. “We have full visibility of production both electronically and posted on production boards. The office staff can see statuses and we can relay direct information to customers. Utilizing the web services capability of MERLIN even enhances information dissemination as various devices can access data within their browsers and dashboards.”

In remarks at IMTS 2014, Brian Papke once again emphasized the importance of data availability to the success of the enterprise: “The implementation of MTConnect is one of the simplest and fastest ways to improve productivity and increase machine utilization,” he said. “Mazak’s MTConnect implementation provided the highest ROI for any capital investment because of the significant increase in utilization of equipment for a very moderate expenditure.”

“Creating a comprehensive machine monitoring system is a big step forward, but universal connectivity and reporting for shop floor and plant-wide communication is truly powerful,” Schawe continued. He also pointed out that MERLIN is showcased in Mazak technology centers across North America, so customers can see it in action. “We think we’ve only scratched the surface with MERLIN’s transformative possibilities. We’re working closely with Memex Automation to bring more and more equipment online with MERLIN. There’s more productivity for us to discover, and that’s what we intend to do.”

David McPhail is the president and CEO of Memex Automation Inc., the developers of the MERLIN MES.

To see the full article, please click here.

Memex Automation attending FABTECH, Nov 11-13, Atlanta, GA

Mazak Optonics has invited Memex to jointly demonstrate MERLIN’s ability to connect all manufacturing machines to management, report plant-wide capacity utilization, and how to increase production and income from operations in real-time.  Yamazaki Mazak is the global leader in the design and manufacture of highly productive machine tools and automation systems. Mazak Optonics is the laser-cutting systems division of Yamazaki Mazak Corporation and the third division to demonstrate MERLIN as a value-add MTConnect-based partner solution.

When: November 11 – November 13
Where: Georgia World Congress Center, 285 Andrew Young International Blvd NW, Atlanta, GA 30313
Booth: #3525: Mazak Optonics and Memex Automation

FABTECH brings together an anticipated 27,000 attendees and 1,400 exhitibing companies under one roof.  It provides a backdrop for visitors to experience live equipment demonstration, find cost savings solutions, and network with industry peers throughout the 500,000+ square feet of show floor throughout the A, B, and C buildings at the Georgia World Congress Center. The event also provides learning opportunities beyond the exhibits with over 100 educational sessions and expert-led presentations on the latest industry trends and technology in the metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing industries.