A New Book
On Lean Manufacturing
From Manufacturing &
Technology News
U.S. machine tool companies need to learn an important and essential lesson of survival from General Electric, and they need to learn it fast, says Jay Lee, director of the recently created Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems at the University of Wisconsin. GE chairman Jack Welch upended his company by forcing it to provide services along with hardware.
"Welch realized that maintenance was a strategic weapon and that by selling a product they're selling a service," says Lee. "They don't use the term maintenance but maintenance is the guts of a service package." GE personnel can now monitor the performance of their products in the field and service them before they fail. "They are able to do this by investing money in maintenance technology," says Lee.
To save itself from the heavy onslaught of international competition, the U.S. machine tool industry must now wake up to the potential of existing technologies that can open a vast, untapped revenue stream. It must pool its modest resources and invest collaboratively in deploying a variety of information, software and hardware systems that will enable companies to monitor their equipment in real time on the factory floor with the intent of preventing downtime. The industry must take the maintenance of its equipment out of the hands of the user, says Lee.
"Web enabled technologies can double the value of the machine tool industry's profits today, it's no joke," says Lee. "I'm not talking about far-out technology but ready-to-use practices."
But the mindset of the machine tool industry is that Web enabled, wireless, or Internet technologies are the purview of some other industry. Machine tool makers consider themselves to be great at their specialty, be it spindles, bearings or machine design and construction. "When you talk about machine software and the networking of machines, it's a different ballgame," says Lee, whose center has 40 large company members paying $35,000 each in dues.
Lee believes the Association for Manufacturing Technology -- AMT in McLean, Va., the trade group representing the machine tool industry, needs to step up to the plate in galvanizing the industry into action. The industry does not need to invent the Internet, wireless devices, sensors or XML standards that could be put to use immediately. "AMT's charge right now is to get people together and start acting on doubling the value of machine tool utilization," says Lee. "Too many machines are sitting idle waiting for calibration or they have a problem waiting to be fixed. The goal should be to eliminate downtime, not design features that a machine designer thinks the customer needs. You can make a machine smarter but if you don't include systems that can't prevent downtime, don't do it; don't do anything unless you can get costs down for the user. There is no other secret to success."
Some machine tool makers are currently receiving operational data from machine tools in the field, but most have no capability of predicting the machine's performance. "You can get data from a remote distance, but who can understand that data and who knows if the data is correct," says Lee. "Adding the Internet into a machine doesn't mean you can predict the machine's performance."
The way to solve this problem is by turning data into information at the machine tool itself. Lee calls this "informating" a machine. This information can then be sent to a service person who can look at the performance of the equipment and compare it with other machines. Only by comparing several similar machines together can a tool builder know the machines that have poor performance. "If you keep track of the machine's performance for your customer, you bear the technology burden on your shoulder and the customer will pay you more and it becomes a profit center," says Lee.
Providing service is the only way some machine tool makers will stay in business, given the incredible economic threat posed by China, says Lee. The Chinese manufacturing sector is still experiencing double-digit growth and with low-cost labor, it's becoming harder for American companies to compete on price. Machine tool makers only will be successful if they are able to help their customers lower costs.
XML is becoming the key language for manufacturing information exchange. XML also provides a machine tool provider with the capability of downloading performance information into an Oracle database, Microsoft XL file or ERP system. "E-manufacturing means Only Handle Information Once -- OHIO," says Lee.
In this format, the information can be assessed by a service technician who can be far removed from the machine. That person can then help a company make adjustments on the fly, rather than having to take a costly trip to the site to assess a machine's problem. For each service call, "somebody has to pay for the airfare and the service technician's time," Lee notes. "A lot of problems can be solved in half an hour, and many companies don't have days to wait for a machine to get back on line."
A majority of the machine tools in operation today go down without providing a signal; or if they are networked, they go down and then send notification to the service department. But that is similar to a GPS locator service that General Motors provides to customers who break down on the highway. "If you're already stuck and your car is smoking and you're in cold weather, so what?" says Lee. "They can come in by parachute to save you, but who cares? You're already stuck. Focusing on after-the-event technologies doesn't help us at all. It only helps decorate the problems not solve the root cause."
E-business cannot happen until the machines on the factory floor become e-enabled, Lee argues. Often times, an OEM will design a new product or part with different specifications. He ships the design to his supplier who is surprised by added complexity and more difficult specifications, and responds by saying he does not have the capabilities to handle the changes without purchasing new tools. The tooling costs will either be buried in overhead charges or they will be tacked onto each unit made. Additional time will be added to the process. "E-manufacturing requires you to make changes knowing exactly your suppliers' capabilities," says Lee. "If you change your dimensions, how do you know if you're suppliers can handle that with their current tooling?"
The machine tool industry is at a juncture, Lee says. Maintenance has always been a back-shop concern, but it must be elevated into being the central focus of customer service. "We all understand that if you want to stay healthy as an individual you have to maintain yourself, yet why don't companies understand that same thing?" Lee asks. "Maintenance is not fail and fix, it's predict and prevent. If you don't know how to predict and prevent, you'll never be a success."
The Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center and is run by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Before becoming director of the center, Lee was director for product development and manufacturing at United Technologies Research Center in Hartford, Conn. Prior to that, he was in charge of the Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation Division at the National Science Foundation. For more information on the center, go to http://www.uwm.edu/CEAS/IMS/.
Current Members Of The Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems
- Rockwell Automation
- Ford Motor
- Johnson Controls
- Eaton
- Wisconsin Electric Power
- United Technologies
- Siebel
- GE Medical Systems
- Toshiba
- A.O. Smith
- Intel
- U.S. Postal Service
- Micro Mobio Wireless
- Automated Precision Inc.
- Genex Technologies
- ATOP
- Dr. Machine.Com
- Hitachi Seikei
- Velicon
- Eagle Technologies
- Industrial Objects
- InterNext Group
- Citation Custom Products
- GM
- Kone Elevator
- Xerox
- Harley-Davidson
- SAP
- Ingersoll Mining
- Kohler
- Miller Brewery
- U.S. Army
- Sematech