Dave McPhail's Great Article in Aerospace Manufacturing and Design

Dave McPhail, President and CEO of Memex Automation wrote a nice article title:

"Machine monitoring enables manufacturing profits and productivity to take off"

in 

Dave brings out great specific metrics when he states:

"MERLIN customers typically increase machine utilization from 10% to 50%. Plants using MERLIN are able to improve output by more than 10% and related income from operations by as much as 60%. MERLIN connects machines across the plant using the MTConnect open, royalty-free interoperability standard as well as other protocols such as Fanuc Focas and OPC.

Rather than offering custom services installation for every client, Memex Automation’s M2M packaged toolkit relies on MTConnect-based hardware and software that do not require programming or setting up of PLCs. The MES leverages the company’s existing investment in plant, equipment, and enterprise software."

The article uses one of Memex Automation's customers to quantify the benefits of Memex:


Magellan Aerospace 

With more than 60 years of experience in producing components for supersonic jet fighter aircraft from its plant in Kitchener, Ontario, Magellan Areospace Corp. was faced with a machine information puzzle when three machines, engineered to meet contracted volumes, appeared insufficient. The Magellan team used MERLIN to uncover the root causes of machine stoppages and other performance issues.

“Downtime events were reduced from 400 hours per month to 100 hours, which is a net increase in machining capacity of 100 hours per month per machine,” says Magellan continuous improvement coordinator Jonathan Ung. “We captured real savings of over $30,000 per month against an initial price of $20,000 for MERLIN.”

Ung adds that on one machine, “We were able to more than double machining time. It was so much of a gain that it was surreal at first, with experienced operators very surprised to see the results.”

After implementing corrective actions identified by MERLIN, Ung’s plant reached a sustained overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of 85%+ from 36%.
Ung explains that 85%+ is considered world class, and “there was surprise among our team and customers that we reached that number so quickly. It also swayed everyone to believe that MERLIN provided a very effective solution.”

Ung next wants to tie into his plant’s CINCOM enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to track shop orders, labor booking, and labor hours; add MTConnect to make it easier for MERLIN to get and read data; and add a DNC solution that will allow operators to remotely and simultaneously upload and download multiple CNCs and files.