Getting Ready For The International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) 2016

The mother-of-all Manufacturing Technology Shows is The International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) 2016 held even number years in September for 6 days at McCormick Place in Chicago.

Below is the MEMEX Team building our booth - always an interesting experience because we do not pay the professionals to do it - we do it ourselves.  We have a great booth location that overlooks Lake Michigan.  The challenge with building this is ALL of the big doors are open and we are dealing with the wind off the lake to assemble this. Thanks to Asim from AMT for taking this photo.

Come check us out!

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

I watched this tonight on Netflix.  I guess I am in the Internet historical mode.  Aaron Swartz was an amazing talent.  This is a true tragedy and just an incredibly maddening, sickening and a very sad story.

MIT comes off looking like a chicken sh!t university in this documentary.

MEMEX Inc. to Demonstrate an Array of World-Class IIoT Solutions at IMTS 2016 September 8, 2016 Press Releases, Recent News

BURLINGTON, ON–(Marketwired – Sep 8, 2016) – Memex Inc. (“MEMEX” or the “Company”) (TSX VENTURE: OEE) is proud to announce that it will be unveiling and demonstrating an array of world-class Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) software and hardware platforms at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago, between September 12th to the 17th.

With these announcements, MEMEX is redefining what it means to truly know what is happening in your plant. MEMEX has long been recognized as the leader in both shop floor monitoring, as well as providing MTConnect software and hardware solutions for any piece of manufacturing equipment on the plant floor.

Doug Bellin, Global Lead for Manufacturing and Energy Industries at Cisco, stated, “Since early 2015, Cisco has been working closely with MEMEX on IIoT security solutions based on MTConnect. Cisco is excited about the upcoming announcements at IMTS 2016. This further demonstrates MEMEX’s global leadership and their ability to connect all devices on the plant floor, using Cisco’s secure networking solutions, thereby turning that raw data into secure actionable information for the operator, plant manager and CxO to use to improve manufacturing productivity.”

New Product Announcements at IMTS 2016

On Monday September 12th, 2016 MEMEX will unveil MERLIN Tempus™ and MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition (EE). MERLIN Tempus is an open and extensible Manufacturing Execution System (MES) platform which offers the next generation of tools such as dynamic easily configurable dashboards and advanced reporting along with many other manufacturing analytical capabilities that enable time-saving execution of continuous improvement initiatives using Real-Time and historical data.

Developed using state-of-the-art software engineering technologies, MERLIN Tempus delivers green-light metrics and analytical capabilities to effectively reduce downtime while increasing throughput and profits. MERLIN Tempus EE extends the capabilities of MERLIN Tempus with full Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and integrated job scheduling. MERLIN Tempus EE creates an opportunity for a dramatic increase in OEE based on accurate Real-Time information collected using a true shop-floor-to-top-floor communication network connecting all machines, old and new.

On Tuesday September 13th, 2016 MEMEX will introduce the MTC-One. MEMEX has established itself as the company that addresses “the last meter” and leaves no machine behind when it comes to legacy connectivity on the plant floor. The MTC-One is the “Swiss army knife” hardware device for legacy machine connectivity enabling any machine on the plant floor to become MTConnect® capable.

On Wednesday September 14th, 2016 MEMEX will introduce MERLIN Financial Overall Equipment Effectiveness™ (FOEE™), MERLIN DNC and MERLIN Continuous Improvement (CI) Professional Services (PS). The holy grail for manufacturing is not simply knowing how effective a specific machine tool or the entire plant is, but rather it is knowing both the effectiveness and the profitability or loss of any given machine tool as well as the entire plant. MERLIN DNC is a reinvention of DNC fitting to current software and hardware platforms with the emphasis on ease of use and feature capabilities. MEMEX CI-PS is a new and much needed service where MEMEX consultants will assist customers in achieving the highest possible in-plant productivity using the MERLIN platform.

Dave Edstrom, CTO of MEMEX Inc., author of “MTConnect: To Measure Is To Know”, as well as former President and Chairman of the MTConnect® Institute, stated, “These announcements at IMTS 2016 represent years of research and development investment. We will be demonstrating and delivering state-of-the-art technologies with industry leading features that will further distance MEMEX from its competition.”

MEMEX’s entirely new software and hardware platforms are built upon the success of the current award-winning MERLIN software suite, which has enabled manufacturers to achieve upwards of 50% increase in productivity, a 20% plus increase in profit based on a 10% increase in OEE, along with securing payback in less than four months which equates to an Internal Rate of Return greater than 300%.

David McPhail, CEO of MEMEX Inc., and Mr. Edstrom, will be in booth E3368 to discuss and demonstrate these new game-changing software and hardware along with other MEMEX industry experts. Both Mr. McPhail and Mr. Edstrom have been recognized as two of the top 30 Advanced Manufacturing Visionaries by Smart Manufacturing Magazine.

About MEMEX:

MEMEX, the developer of MERLIN, an award winning IIoT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in Real-Time, is the global leader in machine to machine connectivity solutions. Committed to its mission of “Successfully transforming factories of today into factories of the future” and encouraged by the accelerating adoption and success of MERLIN, MEMEX is relentlessly pursuing the development of increasingly innovative solutions suitable in the IIoT era. MEMEX envisions converting every machine into a node on the corporate networks, thereby, creating visibility from shop-floor-to-top-floor. MEMEX, with its deep commitment towards machine connectivity, offers solutions that are focused on finding hidden capacity by measuring and managing Real-Time data. This empowers MEMEX’s customers to effectively quantify and manage OEE, reduce costs and incorporate strategies for continuous lean improvement. For more information, please visit:www.MemexOEE.com

Media Contact

Memex Inc.:

David McPhail, CEO

Phone: 519-993-1114

Email: david.mcphail@MemexOEE.com



Rashi Rathore, Marketing Specialist

Phone: 905-635-3040 ext 103

Email: Rashi.Rathore@MemexOEE.com



Investor Relations

Sean Peasgood, Investor Relations

Phone: 416-565-2805

Email: Sean@SophicCapital.com

The Internet Documentary by Werner Herzog -- "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World"

I really enjoyed the new documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, and for those of you that appreciate the history of the net, I think you will as well.

The history of the title is captured here at NPR:

"We should have prepared a wonderful message," says Kleinrock, who headed UCLA's computer lab then. "Certainly Samuel Morse did, when he prepared 'What hath God wrought,' a beautiful Biblical quotation. Or Alexander Graham Bell: 'Come here, Watson. I need you.' Or Armstrong up in the moon — 'a giant leap for mankind.' These guys were smart. They understood public relations. They had quotes ready for history."

On Oct. 29, Kleinrock says, "All we wanted to do ... was to send a simple login capability from UCLA to SRI. We just wanted to log into the SRI machine from UCLA."

And so the first computer network communication was — well, it was supposed to be the word "login."

"The first thing I typed was an L," Kline says. Over the phone, Duvall told Kline he had gotten it. "I typed the O, and he got the O."

Then Kline typed the G. "And he had a bug and it crashed."

And that was it. The first-ever communication over a computer network was "lo." The ARPANET was born."



It shows both the positive and negative side of the Internet.

Werner Herzog is the director and I did know of his work, but when I read his background, I thought it would be worth renting -- and it certainly was. I rented this at Amazon. 

Here is the description:

"In LO AND BEHOLD: REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD, the Oscar-nominated Herzog chronicles the virtual world from its origins to its outermost reaches, exploring the digital landscape with the same curiosity and imagination he previously trained on earthly destinations as disparate as the Amazon, the Sahara, the South Pole and the Australian outback. Herzog leads viewers on a journey through a series of provocative conversations that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works - from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships."

The Village Idiot versus The Town Liar

With Friday release by the FBI on Hillary's emails, this is how I think about the Presidential election of 2016:

We have a choice:

The Village Idiot versus The Town Liar

Hold your nose and vote for Hillary is the only painful, but rational choice since Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. 

This is damage control time for the United States and hopefully one of the parties will put forth a decent candidate in 2020. 

It would be great to see a Republican who believes in science, a rational immigration policy, honestly respects LGBT and people of color run in 2020. The reason that won't happen is because of the primary process where you need to throw red meat to the knuckleheads who vote in the primaries.

It's too bad that the Clintons did not decide to just concentrate on the Clinton Foundation and get the hell out of politics.

I already miss President Obama.......

Nice Article on "Data, Digital Threads and Industry 4.0"

The article, "Data, Digital Threads and Industry 4.0" at proto labs,   brings out the importance of MTConnect:

"Much of the communication capability among this and other equipment is fueled by a more recent development in communications known as MTConnect. This open source protocol is to the factory what HTML is to websites. Without it, sharing information between the dozens of different control builders would be exceedingly difficult, and the Industrial Internet of Things — that subset of the IoT concerned with manufacturing — would come to a screeching halt."
 
I am really glad that the article points out the fantastic job that President Obama has done with manufacturing.  Other politicians give lip service to manufacturing, but Obama has done more for manufacturing then any other president. Period.

The paragraph below discusses this point:

"So great is the potential of digital manufacturing and the IIoT for improving the American economy that President Obama has gotten in on the action. Recognizing the threat of foreign competition and the outflow of U.S. jobs to low labor cost countries, he charged leaders of industry, academia and the government with finding ways to reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing sector. The National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, or NNMI, was born of those efforts. The organization has a broad charter, encompassing development of advanced technologies such as additive manufacturing, development of lightweight metals including magnesium and titanium, advanced composites manufacturing, nanotechnology, and more, but one of its chief focus areas is “creation of a smart-manufacturing infrastructure and approaches that integrate low-cost sensors into manufacturing processes.”

This is a nice quote by MEMEX's CEO Dave McPhail on the huge amounts of data in IIoT:

"One company leveraging the massive amounts of data available from the shop floor is industrial communication technology provider MEMEX Inc., a business partner with Cisco, Okuma, Mazak and others. As CEO David McPhail points out, multinational management consulting firm Accenture estimates that capital investments in IIoT and the productivity gains that should follow could add $6.1 trillion to the United States’ cumulative GDP by 2030. “That’s a huge number, and we believe the IIoT represents no less than the next Industrial Revolution.”

A Typical Saturday Morning at Katie's Cars and Coffee

Below is a 22 minute video I took this morning of a typical day in Great Falls at Katie's Cars and Coffee.  This is THE most impressive group of cars on any random Saturday morning on planet earth.  Yes, I stand behind this statement because today was typical. I just turned on my iPhone 6s video and went up and down the main aisle with commentary. Enjoy!

When George Will Writes On Baseball - Vince Scully

I don't normally read George Will on politics, but when he writes on baseball I go out of my way to read him.  He is absolutely brilliant on baseball.  I was fortunate to attend a number of games at Nats stadium in the lower section near where George Will's season tickets are located.  I never had the great privilege of meeting him, but I did see him on a number of occasions.

He writes a fantastic article on the great Vince Scully called,  "Baseball’s storyteller, our friend".

I love these stories that Mr. Will tells regarding Vice Scully:

"In recent years, Scully has not accompanied the Dodgers on the road. Hence this recent tweet quoting an 8-year-old Dodgers fan, Zoe: “I hate when the Dodgers have away games. They don’t tell stories.”

When the Baltimore Orioles visited Dodger Stadium in July, Scully’s listeners learned that the father of Orioles manager Buck Showalter fought from North Africa to Italy to Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge. Whenever the Orioles come to town, Scully dispenses nuggets about the War of 1812. On June 6 broadcasts, they learned something about D-Day. His neighbor once was Ronald Reagan."

Below is a classic example:

"On Opening Day this year, before the season’s first pitch, Scully was the center of attention on the center of Dodger Stadium’s diamond, standing on the pitcher’s mound with various retired Dodger stars, including pitcher Don Newcombe. Newcombe, now 90, was the starter in the first game Scully participated in broadcasting — Opening Day, 1950, in Philadelphia. Scully knew players who knew Ty Cobb. Scully’s listeners today include the great-great-grandchildren of earlier listeners. Baseball, more than any other American institution, and Scully, more than any other baseball person, braid America’s generations."

It is a great read....

MEMEX Inc. Showcases New World-Class IIoT Solutions at IMTS 2016

MEMEX's Real-Time Machine Manufacturing Value Proposition Increases

BURLINGTON, ON--(Marketwired - Sep 1, 2016) - Memex Inc. ("MEMEX" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: OEE) will be unveiling and demonstrating the next generation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) hardware and software solutions including the next release of MERLIN, the company's core IIoT communication platform, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago from September 12 to 17, located at booth E 3368.

Building upon the success of the current award-winning MERLIN platform, the next release of MERLIN allows manufacturers to take control of their shop floor and optimize efficiency at a whole new level. MERLIN has enabled manufacturers to achieve upwards of 50% increase in productivity and over 20% increase in profit based on a 10% increase in OEE. On average, over 100 MERLIN customers have secured payback in less than four months, which translates to an Internal Rate of Return greater than 300%.

"Our next release of MERLIN is designed to be the most scalable and powerful plant monitoring software in the company's history," said David McPhail, MEMEX's CEO. "With this release we will expand MERLIN´s value proposition for our partners and our customers by giving manufacturers the option to move their real-time machine monitoring off-premise and to scale their Smart Manufacturing needs as required for IIoT centric business outcomes."

New smart-edge IIoT hardware connectivity solutions by MEMEX will open up the world of IIoT for manufacturing by translating a wide variety of digital, analog and other signals/protocols into MTConnect^® (the open source and royalty free interconnectivity communication standard).
With these announcements MEMEX is redefining what it means to truly know what is happening in your plant. Additionally, MEMEX will further itself as the leader in both shop floor monitoring, as well as providing MTConnect^® software and hardware solutions for any machine on the plant floor.

David McPhail and Dave Edstrom, former President and Chairman of the MTConnect^® Institute and the current CTO of MEMEX, will be in booth E3368 to demonstrate the new software and hardware platform along with other MEMEX industry experts. Both Mr. McPhail and Mr. Edstrom were recognized as two of the top 30 Advanced Manufacturing Visionaries by Smart Manufacturing Magazine and can speak on a wide range of industry trends.

MEMEX's IIoT specialists will be looking forward to your visit at IMTS Chicago. If you require any further information or would like to make an appointment for a personal interview, please let us know by emailing Salesgroup@MemexOEE.com.

About IMTS
IMTS 2016 is the 31st edition of the premier manufacturing technology show in North America. More than 2,000 exhibiting companies will occupy 1.3 million net square feet of exhibit space at the McCormick Place complex in Chicago, Illinois. IMTS is held every even-numbered year in Chicago and attracts more than 114,000 buyers and sellers from over 112 countries.
About MEMEX 

Memex Inc., the developer of MERLIN, an award winning IIoT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in Real-Time, is the global leader in machine to machine connectivity solutions. Committed to its mission of "Successfully transforming factories of today into factories of the future" and encouraged by the accelerating adoption and success of MERLIN, MEMEX is relentlessly pursuing the development of increasingly innovative solutions suitable in the IIoT era. MEMEX envisions converting every machine into a node on the corporate network, thereby, creating visibility from shop-floor-to-top-floor. MEMEX, with its deep commitment towards machine connectivity, offers solutions that are focused on finding hidden capacity by measuring and managing Real-Time data. This empowers MEMEX's customers to effectively quantify and manage OEE, reduce costs and incorporate strategies for continuous lean improvement.

For more information, please visit: www.MemexOEE.com

Contact Information

• 
  Media Contact:
  
  David McPhail
  CEO
  Phone: 519-993-1114
  Email: Email Contact
  
  Rashi Rathore
  Marketing Specialist
  Phone: 905-635-3040 ext 103
  Email: Email Contact
  
  Investor Relations
  Sean Peasgood
  Phone: 416-565-2805
  Email: Email Contact

Best Example of MTConnect and StepNC Working Together

This is the best example of MTConnect and StepNC working together.

Just as a reminder (from wikipedia):

MTConnect is a manufacturing industry standard to facilitate the organized retrieval of process information from numerically controlled machine tools.

STEP-NC is a machine tool control language that extends the ISO 10303 STEP standards with the machining model in ISO 14649,^[1] adding geometric dimension and tolerance data for inspection, and the STEP PDM model for integration into the wider enterprise. The combined result has been standardized as ISO 10303-238^[2] (also known as AP238).

STEP-NC was designed to replace ISO 6983/RS274D G-codes with a modern, associative communications protocol that connects computer numerical controlled (CNC) process data to a product description of the part being machined.

Below are the first two paragraphs to give you a preview of this great work.

"Inspiration

When working with StepNC data our team realized that our project could be adapted to use real machining data. MTConnect allows our simultation to be used in much more powerful ways. We envision our project being used in various commercial applications to provide real time monitoring of several machines from one location. Through the use of this software, the efficiency of the manufacturing industry could also be improved by up to or exceeding 15%. The MTConnect data correlates well with STEP-NC data which is our team's main inspiration.

What it does

NC.js is an open source application designed to interpret StepNC data and create a simulation of the described workplan. NC.js has two options that allow the user to either drive the simulation from a StepNC file or instantiate a live viewing instance using a machine that streams MT-Connect data. NC.js utilizes MTConnect data from a live machine to drive a simulation of the machining tool. Then, through associative kinematics, a machine or fixture can be added to the simulation with correct movement in relation to the tools. Real time machining information can be easily compared to the expected result, allowing machining mistakes to be caught in process and corrected, with the eventual goal of mistakes being caught before they happen. The current application is also mobile friendly so that live machining simulations can even be viewed from anywhere by the people who need it most."

Interesting Article on Future of Manufacturing in China

The Washington Post has a very interesting article by Vivek Wadhwa
 Why China won’t own next-generation manufacturing
 There are a number of very interesting points  (that I highlighted) .

"China has made this a national priority and is making massive investments. Just one province, Guangdong, committed to spending $150 billion to equip its factories with industrial robots and create two centers dedicated to advanced automation. But no matter how much money it spends, China simply can’t win with next-generation manufacturing. It built its dominance in manufacturing by offering massive subsidies, cheap labor and lax regulations. With technologies such as robotics and 3-D printing, it has no edge."

 Here Mr. Wadhwa nails it:

"After all, American robots work as hard as Chinese robots. And they also don’t complain or join labor unions. They all consume the same electricity and do exactly what they are told. It doesn’t make economic sense for American industry to ship raw materials and electronics components across the globe to have Chinese robots assemble them into finished goods that are then shipped back. That manufacturing could be done locally for almost the same cost. And with shipping eliminated, what once took weeks could be done in days and we could reduce pollution at the same time."

The education issue below can obviously be addressed, but it is interesting that it has yet to be addressed.

"The bigger problem for China is its workforce. Even though China is graduating far more than 1 million engineers every year, the quality of their education is so poor that they are not employable in technical professions. This was documented by my research teams at Duke and Harvard. Western companies already have great difficulty in recruiting technical talent in China. This will get worse because advanced manufacturing requires management and communication skills and the ability to operate complex information-based factories. Ernst predicts that the increasing scarcity of specialized skills may be the Achilles’ heel of China’s push into advanced manufacturing and services."

Mark Albert's Machine Monitoring Is the Gateway to Data‑Driven Manufacturing Article

Mark Albert of Modern Machine Shop wrote a very nice article and created a great video on machine monitoring.

Mark starts the article with:

"Data-driven manufacturing simply means that we can make better decisions about manufacturing processes because computer networks can gather lots of data from connected devices and turn that data into actionable information. Consequently, one of the best examples of data-driven manufacturing is machine monitoring—connecting machine tools and other types of manufacturing equipment to a network such that monitoring software can show what's happening on these machines. Most shop networks use internet technology to link all kinds of connectable devices and control systems together to share data. This is one reason why the term Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is popular right now."

This is a must read for those in manufacturing.

At IMTS 2016, experience the next generation Smart Manufacturing solutions developed by MEMEX.

At IMTS 2016, experience the next generation Smart Manufacturing solutions developed by MEMEX. With these state-of-the-art technology products take control of your shop floor and optimise efficiency to a whole new level. At booth E 3368 attendees will be able to witness MERLIN, MEMEX's award-winning IIoT communication platform, reporting Real-Time data from machines.   Not attending IMTS 2016 ! Click here to Pre-register for information

Discover the optimum tools needed to plan and execute successful Smart Manufacturing strategies, along with other components to enhance machine productivity.  DNC | memory upgrades | much more     Info@MemexOEE.com Toll Free: +1 (866) 573-3895 Copyright © 2016 MEMEX Inc., All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have indicated an interest in MEMEX IIoT manufacturing productivity products. Our mailing address is: MEMEX Inc 3425 Harvester Rd, Suite 105 Burlington, ON L7N 3N1 Canada