Memex MERLIN Selected by Mazak

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Burlington, Ontario Canada; Tuesday, August 27, 2013 – Mazak, the largest machine tool manufacturer in the world, has selected Memex MERLIN to be implemented at their world class manufacturing facility in Florence, KY, USA.

Following a thorough evaluation of vendors globally, Mazak issued Memex a purchase order to install the MERLIN solution throughout their plant.  MERLIN will be fully operational this fall and on display at Mazak’s Discover 2013, Technology and Education Event, beginning October 8th.

Memex Automation’s flagship product MERLIN is a Manufacturing Execution System application that tracks manufacturing operations bi-directionally from the ERP work order to each machine’s detailed operations.  MERLIN is able to connect to all machines on the shop floor using various protocols, MTConnect adapters or network connectivity devices. It measures capacity utilization and Overall Equipment Effectiveness metrics, and tracks up to the second detail about every event at a machine, all automatically.

“We continue to take a leadership position in propagating the MTConnect open protocol,” said Brian Papke, President of Mazak Corporation. “MTConnect’s value to our customers is in the ability for them to establish extensive and open channels of communication for plug-and-play interconnectivity between devices. MTConnect allows software to be universally applied between different types of machine models so that information is readily available for improving machine tool utilization. Using MERLIN’s capability, Mazak is taking another positive step in further increasing the productivity of our North American operations, ensuring the strong competitiveness of our Kentucky manufacturing.”

According to Neil Desrosiers, Mazak’s developer of digital solutions; “We want to demonstrate to our customers that they, too, can improve their productivity through MTConnect machine monitoring capability. Because when it comes to machine tool performance, you have to measure it before you can improve it.”

“Manufacturers today require both the adoption of new practices and new machining technology.  In order to improve productivity, the machines on the shop floor need to be analyzed continuously in an automated way”, said Memex President & CEO David McPhail.  “More and more companies are interested in enabling LEAN. If you can measure every state and event of the machine, then you have the evidenced-based data to effect change and improve efficiency of operations.” he said.

MERLIN utilizes the MTConnect protocol to communicate shop floor information to the top floor.  This MES solution will allow Mazak to monitor its manufacturing equipment in their award-winning plant and gather valuable data about their manufacturing operations. As well as keeping a historical record, MERLIN presents capacity utilization information in real-time in a format suitable fordisplay on large screens as well as on tablets and portable smart devices.

About Memex Automation Inc.

Memex MERLIN delivers overall equipment effectiveness (“OEE”) metrics in real-time, enabling manufacturers to increase production and increase income from operations profitably. Based in Burlington, Ontario, Memex, as a world leader in manufacturing connectivity solutions, offers Shop Floor to Top Floor Information in Real-Time and has sold a variety of connectivity products since 1992 to over 12,000 customers with 280 dealers, globally.  For more information, call 905.635.1540, email salesgroup@memex.ca, or visit http://www.memex.ca.

Memex MERLIN Wins Frost & Sullivan Award!

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Memex Automation has just won the 2013 Technology Innovation Leadership award for Machine Monitoring Systems, as given by Frost & Sullivan, in an independent and comprehensive evaluation by their Best Practices Research group.

Memex MERLIN scored 9.4 out of 10 and was evaluated against a large well known enterprise MES supplier with a rating of 7.4 and others in the 6.4 range.  This shows that MERLIN is an enterprise class MES system.  With the recent endorsement from Microsoft as the MES solution of choice for discrete manufacturing, and with various machine tool builders adopting MERLIN in their technology centers, it is recognized as a very powerful solution.

MERLIN received a 10 out of 10 rating in the major categories of Impact on Customer Value, Uniqueness of the Technology and Relevance of the Innovation to the Industry, which shows that Memex indeed brings true manufacturing value to our customers.

The report’s conclusion states: “Frost & Sullivan is of the opinion that Memex Automation’s MERLIN solution is the best solution currently available on the market for the efficient management and monitoring of equipment efficiency in the manufacturing sector.”  And furthering customer value: “…equipping customers to best achieve their goals of reducing their operating costs by adopting standard M2M (Machine to Machine) communication protocols and thus passing on the savings to their customers.”

You may be interested to know that a comment in the report about why companies do not succeed with lean initiatives came down to 2 points; “There are two reasons for these failures:

  • Lack of seriousness in the adoption of lean methodologies and culture of the organization
  • Lack of efficient tools for aggregating and analyzing machine data, a process that is the heart of lean manufacturing implementation”

With an independent evaluation like this, Memex hopes that it will assist in your project comfort level to proceed.  If you and your team can accomplish the first point above, then Memex MERLIN can solve the second point.

If you would like a copy of the Frost & Sullivan report, please email us at sales@memex.ca. The award ceremony is being held in mid-September in San Jose, California.

Seeing is Believing

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To increase productivity, enhanced visibility is a must.

A new article was published in Shop Metalworking Technology Magazine that features Memex Automation and Rose Integration, a long time Memex customer.

Rose Integration has embraced the Memex MERLIN MES system and has found that it is a great tool to have in the plant.  Not only does it monitor real-time cycle and down times of their CNC machines, but they have found that you can look at jobs to identify priorities, and it is a great communication tool for operators and other team members alike.

To read more about Rose Integration and their success with Memex products, click here.

2013 – Adapt or Die

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Information presented at the MTConnect 2012 conference in Cincinnati, OH. clearly emphasized that the Manufacturing world is going to change extremely fast in the next few years.

Many examples of “How and Why a Royalty-free and Open-Source Standard is Revolutionizing the Business and Technology of Manufacturing” are provided in the book written by Dave Edstrom, President of MTConnect, To Measure Is to Know.  The main point of the book is that the new manufacturing equipment will have a common “Bluetooth type data” speak-ability to interface with software monitoring, your enterprise resource planning (ERP), and any other software, including your financial software.

This common speak-ability will allow for the capturing and linking of detailed real-time performance monitoring of shop floor actions, with planned road maps executing customer work orders for real-time proactive intervention, and, more importantly, historical information to analyze for strategic competitive advantage and continuous improvement.

Stop and read the above paragraph again.  Think of what “accurate real-time shop floor critical information” would mean in your current work environment.  You could make better decisions throughout your daily manufacturing processes, regarding order tracking, quality, rework, overall scheduling optimization, customer delivery, and most importantly, the impact on profit.  Detailed historical data could dramatically improve job estimates, material usage, updated work order planning values by individual work station, and optimizing product mix decisions using “Contribution by Constraint hour” information.[1]  Guidelines would be implemented for the sequence of handling unplanned events and would be made visible from the shop floor to the top floor, enabling all levels of the organization to automatically take immediate corrective action.

Now you might say “that is great for those manufacturers getting new equipment, but we aren’t in that group.”  This is where the “Adapt or Die” situation becomes visible.  You can either choose the current criteria that is on the market and remain “blinded” because you don’t have the new manufacturing equipment listed above (and in turn, you can get eaten up by the competition with the new equipment).  Or you can launch your own new real-time information revolution on your already existing equipment.

So how can this be done?  How can you launch a revolution on your existing equipment?  Your organization must first be able to recognize that the compatible MTConnect hardware/software information capability is already available for ALL Legacy machines.  Providers such as the Memex MERLIN system and the advanced Financial OEE value stream analysis can be applied specific to your site using your current Line of Business product portfolio.[2]

But what evidence exists except for this Blog?  A brief review of Modern Machine Shops “2012 Top Shop” survey indicates that of the 350 completed surveys, the top 12% show that the average Top Shop versus the average of the “Other” shops are 70% more likely to do Continuous Improvement, 75% more likely to do Value Stream Analysis, 150% more likely to do Theory of Constraints and have 12% higher OEE. (These results are all from data driven activities).  Over half of the completed surveys indicated that they were Job Shop environments.  Top Shops show that the days between order placed and product delivery is 39% less, and the Top Shop customer growth rate is double that of the “Other” shops.

Overall, the “Adapt or Die” scenario is about launching a new information revolution on the already existing equipment, focusing on speed and proficiency.  The real question is “how fast can we implement real-time data collection and incorporate the education to leverage the new information revolution?”  If you are not in front of the competition, you are behind it, and chances are that you will experience several set backs along the way.

– Robert Hansen

Author OEE: A Powerful Production/Maintenance Tool for Increased Profits

R.C. Hansen Consulting, LLC.

www.OEE-College.com

[1] 20% More Profit for Free – Last weeks Memex blog

[2] www.OEE-College.com

Industry Open House

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Hosted by the MMRI and NSERC CANRIMT, Memex Automation invites you to join them on Wednesday May 15, 2013, from 3 pm to 8 pm, at the John Hodgins Engineering Building of McMaster University.

Discover innovative machining strategies for maximizing productivity, optimizing quality, and reducing costs.

Register by May 1, 2013, at http://mmri.mcmaster.ca/openhouse.html and enjoy free admission for manufacturers.

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The Memex display