SHANGHAI—The $150 million “factory of the future” that the Swiss innovator ABB announced nearly a year ago is becoming reality in this enormous city’s Pudong New Area.
The road to manufacturing success today runs through the mountain of data that tools are generating in metalcutting applications, and most importantly communicating and reacting to in real time on the shop floor.
When it comes to using new materials, medical and dental device makers are ultra-conservative—because they need to clear devices through a thicket of federal regulators.
The nexus of cyber and physical security threats is the stuff of nightmares, and while manufacturers are waking up to it as a reality, experts worry that the awakening is happening too slowly.
Data management and the maintenance of clean, usable data for asset performance metrics pose great challenges for manufacturers today.
Comau, Microsoft and ICONICS are debuting here at Hannover Messe the results of their work together to improve manufacturing production around the world, in terms of efficiency and total cost of ownership.
Conrad Leiva, vice president for product strategy and alliance at iBASEt and chair of the smart manufacturing working group at MESA International, speaks with Smart Manufacturing magazine Editor in Chief Brett Brune.
Basic trends in modern manufacturing are driving growth in 3D optical metrology. “One is the highly complex and high-tech material that manufacturers are using today. For example, in the aerospace turbine blade market, they simply cannot touch the part like they used to—the surface finish of the material is too readily affected by any kind of contact metrology."
Meeting the needs of the evolving digital manufacturing initiative, Open Mind Technologies (Needham, MA) has recently partnered with Heidenhain TNC controls (Schaumburg, IL) to provide exclusive first use of their new NC code-based machining simulation solution hyperMILL Virtual Machining.
Unplanned downtime and production loss due to equipment failure is one of the leading losses for manufacturers. Most shops perform maintenance on a fixed schedule or on failure. This means a machine will be maintained regardless of how often it is used and unexpected breakdowns will stop production.
