North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
North America's Largest Metal Forming, Fabricating, Welding and Finishing Event
Monty Brown, Business Development Sales Manager, MRP with SigmaTEK Systems, LLC was nice enough to participate in a special Q&A for our blog this week to give us a preview of his session at FABTECH: Software Solutions for Fabricators. Brown’s presentation is titled Bridging the Gap: Integrate Business Systems with Machines Powered by Software in a Fabrication Job Shop. Learn more about the session here and check out the Q&A below:
What do you see as the biggest drawbacks for shops that don’t have shop floor production systems connected to front-office business systems?
The infamous “status check” is one of my biggest pet peeves and it is a huge productivity killer in sales and production environments. This is the situation where a job is either late, or close to being late, and a buyer simply gets nervous and makes a call to the supplier to check the status. This causes a landslide of waste to roll through all involved companies and/or departments to simply find out if there MIGHT BE a problem with the job. Companies that don’t have real-time data must rely upon a human to check the status of a job. This involves phone calls, emails and walking. All of these are tremendous sources of waste in a production environment. When a person is checking the status of a job, they aren’t drawing parts, selling new orders, or improving production. Status checks do not earn money and they prevent staff from doing value added tasks.
With real-time production schedules, real time alerts, and machines reporting their status automatically, the modern fabricator has instant access to status data. Status checks can be done in seconds rather than minutes or even hours. Customers can even be given the ability to check their order status through a web interface eliminating that landslide of non-productive human involvement.
But the real gold is taking it a step further and eliminating the need for the status check in the first place. Status checks are knee jerk reactions to poor past performance. If a fabricator is regularly late, they will be plagued by status checks because no one trusts that the job is going to make it on time. Building that trust means resolving foundational issues that make jobs late. Having real-time inventory and planning data allows you to know you are going to be out of material BEFORE you actually run out. Having real-time production data allows business systems to notify staff BEFORE a job is late. In both of these cases, staff is working on actual future problems and not perceived problems. Once a company makes a habit out of shipping on time, they won’t be drawn into the “status check” black hole in the first place.
What are the biggest technical and cultural struggles manufacturers face with integrating business systems with the actual shop floor?
Right now the biggest struggle is acquiring data from all of the different machine manufactures and converting that data into a useful format for any given business system. Most modern CNC machines have the ability to transmit their runtime data. However, it is only in the last 8 years that the industry has begun to standardize the way this data is sent. Some equipment manufacturers have proprietary communications while many are starting to follow standards such as MT Connect. Even amongst those using MT Connect, some charge for the service while others make the service a standard feature.
The next problem is that, since equipment manufacturers are just now starting to standardize their communicatios, most business software has no standard method to use this data. This turns every machine integration into a one-off project requiring participation by the client, machine manufacture and business software to coordinate an effective integration. This makes integrations of this sort complex, expensive and out of reach to many end users.
What are some of the first steps that a metal fabricator can take to automate this data flow automation?
The first step is to ask lots of questions when you are buying new business systems and production machines. Find out what connectivity standards they follow and what the costs are to access that technology. It is no longer enough to understand the cutting capability of a given machine or whether your business systems has a good inventory solution or not. You have to find out if your machine and business system plays well with others.
It is almost guaranteed that the machine manufacture will have some method to communicate data, but the devil is in the details of what format they are sending that data in. If you are in doubt, I recommend starting with the business system or an independent consultant to make sure you get the answers you need. There are plenty of companies that specialize in communicating with modern machines as well as retrofitting older machines.
How does all of this align with Industry 4.0 trends?
When Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) first came on to the market, we were all very excited that we could push a button on the shop floor and report our production to the rest of the company. However, with the maturity of automatic load and unload systems, we no longer rely on humans to hit buttons to start machines and we certainly don’t want a human to take the time to tell the business system that a machine is automatically starting. Instead, we want the machine to handle that communication for us.
For instance, let’s take a modern fiber laser. Most nesting software will automatically nest parts for that laser. That laser will communicate with a tower system to feed the appropriate material, cut the nest, and then remove the cut parts. If you buy within one manufacture, that laser can communicate with a press brake letting it know that a given part is on the way. With Industry 4.0, we will no longer require an end user to buy all of their machines from one manufacture to have an integrated shop floor. They will be able to buy the latest and greatest fiber laser from Manufacture A and pair it with their favorite press brake from Manufacture B. And both those machines will notify the business system of their material utilization, and completions status in real time. We will know about problems before or as they are happening and not when the customer calls to ask where their parts are.
There are shops with this type of system running today, but like I mentioned previously, they are typically one-off projects and only available to companies with the staff and infrastructure to hold all of the pieces together. When Industry 4.0 is truly thriving, this integration will be available to the smaller shops with whatever machine configuration they desire.
Thank you for reading this blog and I hope to see you all at FABTECH 2016 in Las Vegas!
FABTECH 2024
About the Expo
North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
