The article starts out discussing ITAMCO:
"THIRTY CRITICAL MACHINE TOOLS at ITAMCO have been selected to provide real-time, accurate information about their performance. Improvement opportunities will become apparent to everyone, from machine operators to the Chief Financial Officer. “Right now, we don’t know what we don’t know,” said Joel Neidig, an engineer at ITAMCO. That’s a typical problem for manufacturing facilities that rely on verbal and paper records to evaluate machine performance and workflow. Machine statistics are very difficult to gather and organize into any kind of coherent picture. If machine data is tracked manually, the information might be outdated before it’s compiled or inaccurate."
Below is a quote that I really like by A.J. Sweatt:
MTConnect
Is a Free and Open Bridge
• “To
say MTConnect is revolutionary is a gross understatement. Connecting machines
and collecting data using the same protocol not only gives in-plant management
far greater agility and control; it also allows for a level of communications
between
suppliers, customers, OEMs, sales and international partners that could easily
be the greatest achievement for manufacturing since CNC. Or even the Internet
itself.”
–The Shot Peener | Spring
2012 A.J. Sweatt AJ Sweatt Logic and Communications
"A noteworthy point regarding alarms was made by Stephen Luckowski, Chief of Materials, Manufacturing & Prototype Technology with US Army ARDEC at the 2011 MTConnect conference: “Typically when the machine alarms, it’s too late, the tool is already broken. That means that just collecting and reporting alarms is only part of the problem. To prevent alarms that relate to downtime, we need to use MTConnect to understand the alarm and develop a pattern of what causes the downtime.”
