Memex Automation Improves Manufacturing Efficiency at Magellan Aerospace

Memex Automation’s (CVE:OEE) MERLIN product is responsible for an over 48% increase in the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of Mississauga, Ontario-based Magellan Aerospace, according to an article written by Al Bredenberg at ThomasNet, Tech Trends Journal.

Memex’s MERLIN product allows manufacturing companies to measure overall equipment effectiveness in real-time, enterprise-wide, machine by machine. It monitors production and capacity utilization on the shop floor, improving profitability, reducing waste and ensuring compliance with regulations. The tool 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.

In the case of Magellan Aerospace, the company installed MERLIN to monitor a three-machine cell at one of its aircraft component production plants, hoping to get more production from its existing equipment and deciding to hold off on spending money to acquire a fourth machine.

Bredenberg, in his article titled “Going the Distance”: Solving ‘Last-Meter’ Connectivity on the Shop Floor”, writes that with MERLIN, Magellan was able to identify an “inordinate amount of optional stop time” that was causing about 100 hours of idle time per month for each machine.

The aircraft parts company was able to improve its OEE rate of 36.9% to 85%, saving capital from the cost of a new machine and monetizing $40,000 per month of production time, which was enough to recover the cost of MERLIN in just four months.

“Allowing managers to view basically any output that can be generated by an old machine, MERLIN can monitor its metrics, signals, and functions — number of fault events, quality, cycle time and count, part names and counts, alarm states, interrupted cycles, down time, feeds and speeds, idle times – and thus overall equipment effectiveness (OEE),” the article read.

“It essentially gives the machine a second life.”

The word is spreading about Memex’s MERLIN. Last month, Memex said it sold $106,000 of the company’s flagship manufacturing productivity tool to Toronto-based Club Coffee, a custom coffee roaster in North America.

Solving the last-meter problem, which is defined as the gap preventing connectivity and communications for manufacturers, means “getting data from countless devices and putting it into an easy-to-read format, so data can become actionable intelligence anywhere, anytime, on any device,” Memex’s Chief Technology Officer, Dave Edstrom, was cited as saying in the Tech Trends article.

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