• Advanced Manufacturing

Multi-location - digitization: the vaccine that the metal industry needs

  • Advanced Manufacturing
The industrial sector, like many others, is facing a period of uncertainty as the economic and business scenario has been radically transformed over the last few months by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. One thing’s for sure: emerging intact from such a delicate situation doesn’t just depend on ourselves; there are many intervening factors and they are closely connected, such as the recovery of the major world powers’ economies, the measures taken by the governments in each country or the evolution of the virus itself.

Smart Nesting, when the tool and the engineer go hand in hand

  • Nesting
Material waste and a lack of agility in nesting or the nesting of parts are two of the most common problems faced by metal processing companies which slow down the company’s response time for its clients and make the process more expensive. This is due to them not using the appropriate technology in order to fully exploit each piece of sheet metal during the cutting process and/or the fact that this process is completed manually or using slower solutions. Equally, the work of the production engineer mustn’t be knocked as they are experts in the optimization of nesting and machining; the maximization of the margin for each production order received depends on their intervention.

Machine Communication Standards

  • Advanced Manufacturing
We all know that our goal is to achieve online connectivity between our IT systems and the real processes taking place in our factories. However, in reality, nowadays there is no single communication standard which allows us to communicate our IT solutions (ERP/MRP/MES) to any given machine from any given manufacturer and, of all these terms, it is not easy to understand which are important in each case.