Posts

2009 was a Banner Year!

/in /by

Much work was done in 2009 with new product development and many customer deployments. The flagship OEE+DNC product was rolled out this year.

Many customers offered to work with us to evaluate its merits as well as many aerospace customers, including one in a corporate wide multi-plant rollout into production.  Going into 2010 we are working with about 2 dozen customers in various stages of deployment with this enterprise product offering 5-20% increase in productivity at the shop floor.

Memex’s engineering team continued in its reputation as the “Go To machine technology company”, and rolled out many new hardware and software products in 2009, from memory boards, the Ax750 I/O Link – Fanuc Interface Board, Ax2200HS High Speed File Server, AxDNC and AxConfig software tools and many other items.

Although it was a tough year for our manufacturing industry, our business paradigm of offering tools to increase efficiency was in demand, and we responded with solutions, attending trade shows, industry association events and delivering customer successes.

Company-wise, thanks to some timely positioning of resources, our investors and our employees along with our distribution channel are very pleased and we are ready to roll for 2010!

OEE in Process or Discrete Manufacturing

/in /by

The Process manufacturing sector has been way ahead of the rest of manufacturing in adopting and using efficiency metrics, all for a good reason. Discrete manufacturing has not been able to adopt metrics easily in the past and we now have a cost effective solution that can be of huge advantage to companies.

The simple logic here is the Process manufacturing sector, characterized by chemical changes in product often in a continuous environment (eg. Refinery), is very capital intensive using process control MES systems that capture all this information, so it is then easy to report on the metrics. Typically multi-million dollar project implementations, all part of the initial machine deployment.

Discrete (CNC and many other types) on the other hand, which are characterized by making individual parts, have not needed the sophisticated MES controls and could not justify the very expensive implementations of $10,000 to $millions per machine, so they have not done much in the OEE metric area. Up until now, and primarily because of our product, we have brought the price point down to the $4,000 per machine level – which is now cost effective and justifiable. The benefits of 20% or more productivity (our customers say it is much more) pay for this system very quickly.

And we can make this an “Operator-less” input – meaning we pick up signals right from the machine and there is no need for an operator to give some input, unless required for reject or downtime reason codes. We are hearing from our customers that this is very important – you can just imagine all the reasons. Many ERP and other solutions just about all require operator input (bar-code scanning etc.) and this is old thinking and often problematic with operator productivity, errors and even hand writing on a clipboard for entry days later. Our real-time, direct connection is most accurate and saves much labor time – often justifying the hard direct expense in itself, let alone the benefits of increased efficiency, lower product costs and competitive advantage.

MEMEX - Measuring Manufacturing Excellence Logo

Customer Perspective on Benefits of OEE

/in /by

There is always interesting new benefits of OEE from a customer perspective especially as it relates to a positive experience for operators and people on the shop floor. A recent interview dug up these golden nuggets:

“We now have a tool to communicate to the people on the shop floor that our performance can improve.”

“The OEE data provided improves human as well as machine-to-machine communications.”

“We believe we can use Memex data to motivate employees with a shared understanding of how we can be more productive, and that’s what it’s all about.”

“Our biggest differentiator is productivity and OEE helps us identify areas to improve our efficiency.”

“Machines are islands of unconnected information – like having a group of office PCs, each with different software – now we can network machines together, just like networking an office.”

“We had passive OEE with manual clip boards and now we have active OEE, visible in the plant.”

“The key to better productivity is not just to track performance, but to act on problems in real-time.”

“Machine connectivity unites the islands of machine automation, establishing a fully-connected, enterprise-wide manufacturing nervous system that gives real-time visibility of production and the ability to adapt and control each machine.”

“Customers can see and believe in what we’re doing to improve on time delivery because we have traceability of machine operations through OEE.”

MEMEX - Machine Data Collector

Advantages of migrating from serial to Ethernet communications on the shop floor

/in , /by

As published in Canadian Metalworking magazine, March 2010.

There is a technological shift going on out on the shop floor that is allowing machines to communicate directly with corporate information systems, generating big benefits for companies by increasing their operational efficiency. Applications are available that provide real-time machine monitoring, acquisition of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) metrics, dynamic computer-aided machining, automatic synchronization of part programs, DNC, work order
scheduling, and central control of machine operations.

Why Make the Leap?

The Internet has changed how the world gets its information: it’s all about easy access. Manufacturing machines that communicate via serial ports run the risk of being not connected to the information highway and consequently being an unproductive asset. If these machines could be refurbished with advanced communications technology, a company could avoid spending millions on new machines. Furthermore, extracting operational information from all its machines, both new and old, would permit a company to optimize its manufacturing processes. Companies that have moved to the Ethernet report a significant improvement in efficiency and cost savings.

MEMEX - Measuring Manufacturing Excellence Logo

Memex OEE+DNC Increases Productivity and Lowers Costs for U.S. Aerospace Customers

/in , /by

Memex announces that many new aerospace consumers in the USA and throughout North America have chosen our products to monitor and control their machines on the shop floor. They are utilizing Memex’s complete system to address their OEE and DNC requirements. This gives them the ability to monitor production status, run time, down time reasons, reject causes in real time and automatically report on OEE accurately. They have control of their part programs with Memex’s newly re-designed, state of the art DNC software, called AxDNC. Work orders on the floor are managed through Memex’s OEE+DNC and can be integrated to their ERP systems as well as their CAD/CAM part programs and HR reporting.