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Saturday, March 24, 2007 |
Another loss I had at the recent ARC Forum in Orlando was the ability to check in with all the OMAC working group meetings. When you are only one person and there are several simultaneous meetings, well...you get the picture. At any rate, I've sat through several meetings of a working group led by Sid Venkatesh of Boeing that was trying to achieve interoperability among CAD applications. The major CAD vendors were openly hostile to the idea, and the working group appeared to be going nowhere. The group has morphed into another working group and it appears to be making headway. Here's a press release I received yesterday from the group. Congratulations, Sid.
The Open Modular Architecture Controller User Group's (OMAC) Human-Machine Interface (HMI) Working Group has finished a trial application at Boeing using OPC as the integration technology to connect a computer numeric control (CNC) machine's data to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. OPC is an industry standard for open connectivity.
The Working Group organized a joint project among OMAC HMI members Boeing, Okuma and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to evaluate that integration and determine if part accountability could be achieved with minimal integration efforts.
The project team's goal for this trial was to examine the effectiveness of an Okuma personal computer (PC)- based controller in collecting cycle times, setup and job times, part quantities and other vital information on machine and job performance to minimize data entry requirements for machine operators and to provide real-time parts cost accounting to an ERP accounting subsystem. The trial was performed on manufacturing of Boeing 737 Leading Edge (LE) Panels.
"Overall, we successfully achieved most of our goal of a 'touch' to 'non-touch' operation," said OMAC Chairman Sid Venkatesh of Boeing. "We were able to replace the tedious data entry process required of the machine operators with a more automated approach. We were also able to validate that CNC-ERP connectivity was possible, simple and cost-effective once the details of interaction between the shop floor and the scrap reorder system were established."
Okuma exposed the necessary data from the Okuma Thinc control standard application programming interface (API) in an OPC wrapper. Boeing and NIST were able to complete the project with no additional assistance from Okuma.
The project team plans to continue refining the application to demonstrate the efficiencies associated with Lean manufacturing--targeting improvements in inventory control that would equate to cost savings.
8:04:21 AM 
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I've been interviewing for an article on MES. Just finished interviewing Bob Lenich of Emerson Process Management yesterday then did a check of my RSS feeds and saw this post from Jim Cahill of Emerson Process Experts blog about installing MES. Comments from the two were congruent, which is refreshing ;-)
If you are interested in finding out what's happening in MES (the suite of software applications known either by the old name of manufacturing execution systems or by a new name floating around to see if it sticks manufacturing enterprise solutions), Jim's post offers a glimpse. If you've actually done something in this area, send me a note. One of the things I'm learning about recent advancements is that people are actually using ISA-88 and ISA-95 definitions and models to expedite installing the applications and getting communications right. Bob told me of an application that went from concept to installation in 9-10 months. More detail coming in the May issue of Automation World.
7:16:38 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Gary Mintchell.
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