Your New Competitive Advantage.

Kepware has long been synonymous with industrial connectivity. Having been founded in the mid-1990’s, they have successfully helped connect a large variety of industrial equipment across a wide range of industries, giving a multitude of engineers the tools to successfully roll out M2M projects. However, with the onset of Industry 4.0 and advancements in the field of industrial connectivity, new solutions have arisen to meet the growing demands of manufacturers. These...

Over the past few years, there have been many significant changes in the manufacturing industry. From a global pandemic to supply chain issues to worker shortages, challenges have never been greater. Not to mention, these challenges come at a time when demand is high and manufacturing is expecting robust growth over the next decade. Another significant change has been Industry 4.0, which has been a hot topic for manufacturers for several years now. The single best way to...

Recently, I had the chance to host a panel at IIoT World’s Digital Manufacturing Day with technology leaders from Fulcrum, UpKeep, and MachineMetrics. During the panel, titled The Death of MES: A New Vision for the Factory Software Stack, we challenged the standard approach to building manufacturing operations systems. [Watch the recording] Our proposition is that these broad, largely organizational solutions cannot achieve the depth and complexity necessary to generate true...

With labor, transportation, and material costs rising in every manufacturing sector, companies are anxious to find ways to save money. For CNC machining, tooling is an additional, often unforeseen, cost that must be incurred as a part of the business. Developing a better understanding of the factors that play a part in tooling costs as well as learning how you can track the health of tools will help to manage a healthier bottom line. This guide explores the factors that...

Tool breakage has always been a challenge for machining operations. These breaks can occur during regular machining cycles due to tool wear that eventually results in failure. They may also occur due to improper settings, human error, equipment malfunction, or for a variety of other reasons. When tools break, costs pile up. Downtime means fewer first-quality pieces and potential missed deliveries. It also drives up labor and materials costs from scrap and additional labor...

In today’s hyper-competitive manufacturing environment, those who don’t improve risk being left behind. Continuous improvement has long been the goal of a slate of methodologies, including Lean, Six Sigma, and others. But what is continuous improvement in the manufacturing sector? How can a company initiate a journey using best practices and advanced technology to improve and optimize manufacturing processes? The Model of Continuous Improvement Deeply rooted in the Lean...

Have you ever heard the expression "out of sight, out of mind"? Sometimes ignorance is bliss. But in manufacturing, being out of sight and out of mind may mean losing focus on shop floor activities, and falling behind production goals. Manufacturing has traditionally used visual tools to keep employees focused on production. And anyone who has been in the industry remembers the whiteboards, grid boards with tape and string, clipboards used for manual data collection, and...

Manufacturing leaders today are having an increasingly difficult time choosing software that meets their ever-growing needs. Traditionally, manufacturing operations would use an ERP/MRP system that was designed for their facility, and fill in gaps with Microsoft Access, Excel, or paper. These systems require a lot of maintenance, manual data entry, and usually a team of consultants to implement. ERP systems have attempted to solve these problems, only to add complexity to...

If I've learned anything from the recent return to in-person events, it's that nothing can match the energy and depth of insight gained from face-to-face interactions. At EASTEC, I spent three days speaking with local manufacturers, suppliers, and customers, and it is clear that the urgency to embrace shop floor digitalization has arrived. Over the course of the pandemic, manufacturers have navigated volatile market conditions leading most to realize that adoption of...

The expense of tooling combined with scrapping defective parts makes extending tool life an important objective for metal cutting companies. Traditional machining relied on settings determined experimentally to determine the life of a machine tool. Operators could log part counts until a tool failed or began developing out of spec parts. The average of these part counts could be used to establish a threshold for the life of the tool. Alternatively, they could use the machine...