Makes Your factory smart?

Evolution of Machine Communication

The need for machines to “talk” to software isn’t new. For years sheet metal industry stakeholders have integrated this ability in various scenarios, typically for an automated cell or line, such as when a sheet metal stacker loading a punch or laser machine forwarded cut parts to a panel bender. In these cases, machines had to inform software systems when they were ready to execute a new operation or when they had finished it. In this way, the company could run a complete shift, usually at night, so that the line could work unattended. Such lights-out automation used a validation software system to control all the machinery involved, detecting when a machine finished its work and was ready to load the following process.

The Manufacturing Brain

Today most machine tools are subject to the demands of external software. They wait to receive a CNC program. With the right data and logic, external software determines what tasks machines execute and when they execute them. The machines send status information to external software while people monitor the operation with the machine control or via supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA).

This is all going to change. A smart factory’s automation requires intelligently applied control that goes beyond the control loop implemented in a SCADA system. A smart factory effectively has a “brain” capable of orchestrating all the elements involved in the production, from order entry through planning, purchasing, and execution.

The functional structure of a sheet metal factory will change. To manage an environment of continual change, planning, engineering, and operations functions will overlap more than ever as more processes become automated.

The manufacturing brain will change just about everything in the sheet metal factory. Consider computer-aided manufacturing. Any CAM system should minimize waste and inefficiency. It should not only produce the best nest but also generate the best processing method that satisfies quality requirements and minimizes processing time on the machine. Today, to maximize margins for each production order, a skilled programmer must generate the best possible nest, optimize material use, and select the most efficient cutting method.

The Future Requires Collaboration

The future will bring a machine that decides autonomously. It will do this based on its own status and information from a host of interconnected systems, including MES and CAM. Their interaction will be largely automatic. People will intervene only to handle the exceptions.

Fabricators will see more machines come with powerful software, both in the machine control and in the cloud. Using data and logic, intelligent systems will decide what to do next and what information to exchange with various machines. These machines will be immersed in a factory choreography, dancing their part while synchronized with the rest of the manufacturer’s systems.

Machines started to “talk” a long time ago, and they keep on learning more vocabulary and languages. Today machines and software are merging, and to function properly they need the right architecture based on solid protocols that support real-time interoperability. Above all this, a strategic approach for collaboration among machine tool builders, software developers, and system integrators will be essential to unleash the amazing concepts yet to be imagined. By working together, we will define the sheet metal factory of the future.