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TIP 72 MoldMaking Technology —— MAY 2017 Monitor Your Machines MACHINING/SOFTWARE By Greg Mercurio If you manage or work on a shop floor, then you have likely heard about machine monitoring. In basic terms, it is a way to measure shopfloor productivity that allows manufactur- ers and executives to make informed decisions based on what processes are happening. This way, you can streamline the process, reduce downtime and much more. For mold manufacturing, these processes may take some time, maybe hours, to produce a single part. Mold shops need to know how long it is going to take to get that mold out the door and what may be preventing that from hap- pening. Knowing that something is wrong hours later may affect the total job and output. So if the operator can inform a higher-up quickly that there are issues with the tooling or fixturing, for example, he can communicate why the machine is stopping. Now, armed with this new informa- tion, the shop can streamline this process and improve throughput and productivity. Machine monitoring allows shop floors to make informed decisions as a team. Plus, adding software that is designed to network CNC machines, robots, programmable logic controllers and part markers, while also managing CNC programs, offsets and param- eters, will allow moldmakers to drip-feed, or spoon-feed, the typical large programs. This also allows mid-tape restart, which means that if something such as a tool breaks, the operator can simply restart and continue from that point in the process or start from the beginning. These solutions work hand in hand. You get a reliable com- munication system and a method for effectively monitoring machine efficiency and productivity. Then there is pairing the MTConnect protocol with machine monitoring tools. The MTConnect protocol is an open-source, royalty-free communication method for delivering analytics to an off-the-shelf product. Ideally, MTConnect is going to speak English, if you will, to all the different types of equipment that are in the shop versus hav- ing proprietary islands that are each different and have to work with multiple vendors to obtain the varied subsets of data off the machines. With a single solution, you save time and money because everyone is looking at the same data. As shops continue to streamline productivity and integra- tion, machine monitoring with a push behind MTConnect has become a common topic. Previously, MTConnect was believed to be cost-prohibitive, with vendors selling propri- etary software, making it expensive and restrictive. Today, it continues to change the game as far as pricing, so more people will be asking about it. With traditional software models requiring the customer to purchase the software outright, a new cloud-based sub- scription model concept is on the rise. Removing network requirements, as well as expensive database licensing and servers, makes these previous barriers to entry a thing of the past. Seeking monitoring solutions from companies with experience and a breadth of products will help moldmakers take the leap into machine monitoring. CONTRIBUTOR Greg Mercurio is president of Shop Floor Automations Inc. Machine monitoring allows shop floors to make informed decisions as a team. Image courtesy of Shop Floor Automations Inc. Machine monitoring, hosted on-site or in the cloud, is essential for mold builders. Implementing machine monitoring via MTConect-supported hardware and software will help ensure continued compatibility and productivity. FOR MORE INFORMATION Shop Floor Automations Inc. / 619-461-4000 info@shopfloorautomations.com / shopfloorautomations.com