Seiki Systems will be demonstrating real-time production management software at the forthcoming Productivity Partnerships exhibition to be held at the 600 Centre in Shepshed, Leicestershire.

During the three-day event, we shall be monitoring a production cell involving 600 Centre’s Fanuc Alpha vertical machining centre with robotic loading. This will not only provide a wireless communication link for CNC program management but also enable ‘real time’ production data acquisition and machine utilisation, together with automatic alarm generation via text message or email.

Some 20 of the UK’s leading suppliers of machine tools and robotics, software, inspection, work-holding, tooling and control systems will be involved with Productivity Partnerships 2004 between 19 and 21 October.

A donation by Seiki Systems of 20 seats of its NMS software to Warwickshire College’s Trident Technology and Business Centre will help trainees, students and visitors to the centre involved with manufacturing technology gain an appreciation of the benefits that can be achieved by being continuously informed of the performance and status of the CNC machine tools installed on the shopfloor.

Said David Trowell, general manager of Seiki Systems: “It is so important to increase productivity by improving shopfloor procedures and to support expensive machine tools. However, to achieve this you need to be able to collate, interpret and understand where and when deficiencies occur and this is where Seiki Systems can provide the solution.”

The software and systems installation by Seiki Systems is an important productivity feature of the Dugard CNC Advanced Technology Centre set up as a joint venture between Warwickshire College and C. Dugard of Hove that now contains five of its CNC machine tools. Off-line CNC program generation will be available through Licom Systems of Coventry’s AlphaCAM software from which Seiki Systems Networked Manufacturing System will distribute, monitor and manage any programs created and subsequently edited at each machine.

Through Ethernet connection, each of the machine tools installed will be connected via NMS software and monitored in ‘real-time’ in order to collate up to the minute data on productive and non-productive events such as machine running, or when it is waiting for tooling or setting. This information is then used by Seiki Systems to prepare easy to understand pie charts and trend graphs created from event logging techniques to provide management reports from which decisions can be made for improvement.

Installed at the Dugard CNC Advanced Technology Centre are two of the company’s Eagle vertical machining centres which includes 450 and 660 versions. CNC lathes installed include an Eagle 100, the new Eagle 25 multi-axis and a CMZ 20M with driven tools.

These machines will form a key resource for Trident Technology and Business Centre as part of its high technology based apprenticeship schemes and workshop training courses. These schemes and courses are used by blue chip companies such as Jaguar and Rolls Royce as well as a multitude of smaller engineering and manufacturing businesses.

The centre also has access to 3-D and five-axis CADCAM, conference facilities and a library available through Trident and a resident application engineer from Dugard will always be on site.

Seiki Systems Free of Charge DNC offer, which was running in conjunction with Production Engineering Solutions (PES) magazine, has now come to an end, with many happy new and existing customers signing up for the free offer.

We will be taking this offer ‘on the road’ at various Open Houses across the country, so if you still planning to buy a new CNC machine tool, keep an eye on the industry press or contact us to see when you can next take advantage of this unique and genuine offer.

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The progressive installation of networked manufacturing software (NMS), supplied by Seiki Systems of Brighton, has proven to be a major contributor to hiking production efficiency to over 72 per cent at Integrated Hydraulics based in Warwick. For as well as allowing the company to run in a paperless environment, it ensures the secure, traceable and efficient transfer of part programs and tooling/fixturing information direct from the production department to the six CNC machining centres on the shopfloor.

While DNC and production support information was important, NMS is also capturing a host of critical data on the efficiency and utilisation of the machines and this has formed the backbone of a continuous improvement strategy at the company.

According to production engineer Tony Cave: “NMS gives us the means to measure our production efficiency, identify areas of downtime, schedule jobs more efficiently and obtain accurate cost information. It also helps our operators too, as they can see what’s scheduled for a machine or working shift and know that the relevant tools, programs and components are always there before the job is started.”

Monitoring the performance of the six machining centres which include three horizontals with pallet systems, NMS has had a major influence on manufacturing efficiency. By running in a paperless production environment, created through the Seiki Systems manufacturing software, all drawings, tooling information, workholding data, work queue information and part programs are downloaded direct to shopfloor PCs set on workbenches adjacent to each machine.

Moreover, the company now has the ability to assess the performance and hence utilisation of each machining centre through 24 hours a day. Not only does this identify areas causing downtime, it provides an analysis of the actual causes and provides the current background to implement corrective measures.

Integrated Hydraulics has taken full advantage of the modular constructed system which enabled the company to justify a progressive build- up of the network over a number of years and in particular expand the system as new machining centres have been installed. In the early days, the system was just used to handle all DNC program functions. However, as the benefits of being able to automatically monitor the performance in real time of its investment in machine tools, the business benefited as production engineers were able to run and schedule the machines more efficiently and thus gain ever-higher levels of productivity. So when two new vertical machining centres were added in November 2003, two additional shopfloor terminals were purchased and linked into the network.

As production engineer Tony Cave explained: “NMS has had a major impact on our machining operations. We can pinpoint specific areas to focus where improvements can be made. In the last 12 months alone, we know the system has helped us improve production efficiency by a further 5 per cent.”

He follows on to explain: “Now with the recent addition of Seiki System’s new Graphical Work Planning Board (GPB), which provides real time graphical display of jobs for each machine, we are able to improve further the flexibility of our production planning through a live visual display of just what is happening to schedules on the shopfloor.”

Not only will this enhance the data from the company’s MRP system so they can instantly see where jobs are going to miss delivery dates, they are able to take action well before there’s a problem. He says: “While fire fighting is great to get over immediate problems, this capability to see ahead will also ease any headaches from juggling urgent jobs and take away any worry about the longer term effect further down the schedule.”

Established over 30 years ago and employing some 180 people at two adjacent locations in Warwick, Integrated Hydraulics is a recognised world-leader in the design, manufacture and supply of hydraulic screw-in cartridge valves and hydraulic integrated circuits manifold blocks. These are used in numerous sectors as diverse as construction, mechanical handling, waste management, hydraulics, mining, quarrying and agriculture.

Key customers include such well known names as JCB, Volvo, Caterpillar, Komatsu and Terex. The company also has a sales and manufacturing operation in the USA.

The production of manifolds covers a wide range of blocks in both aluminium and steel with section sizes from 25 mm2 up to 150 mm² and in lengths up to 300 mm. These components are multi-fixtured, typically four at a time, enabling some 5,000 blocks to be produced each month working through a two-shift 17.75 hourly pattern. With smallish batch sizes, most jobs are changed over at least every other day which would normally lead to unacceptable levels of downtime.

As Tony Cave commented: “We don’t have the luxury of continuous production on the same job, which means machine utilisation levels can be really high. But, with the aid of our monitoring system we are now recording a production efficiency level of over 72 per cent, which is a massive improvement. Eventually, we aim to take this to 80 per cent which we see as being the optimum for our sort of work.”

It was on the multi-pallet machines with the multi-fixtured parts that Integrated hydraulics worked very closely with Seiki Systems to develop a method of live scheduling the individual parts on the machine. Comments David Trowell, general manager of Seiki Systems: “This took several months to develop because of the complexity of the issue but, we can now achieve such precise control over production of individual parts at Integrated Hydraulics that no work scheduler anywhere in the world can match.”

Tony Cave reaffirms the situation telling how Integrated Hydraulics can mix any combination of parts on its multi-fixtures pallet machines inform the operator where and when to load the pallet and track, via different colour representation on the screen, where the parts are, predict when they will be finished and be notified when the job is complete or warn when there is a problem.

The NMS machine status display covers: production, waiting, alarm- type, setting, maintenance, housekeeping and programming. Each has various sub-menus for more detailed information. Data can be viewed with respect to a specific job part number or machine and various bar and pie charts along with numerous tabulated lists can be produced to show performance in any of these areas. “Such visual information provides an immediate dynamic picture of the complete manufacturing process,” insists Tony Cave.

A common colour code is used throughout the screen displays whereby green relates to production running, red is job waiting, yellow is under setting and blue is housekeeping or not cleared for work. Job breakdown analysis reports show actual times and costs against planned figures, so direct comparisons can be easily and quickly made. Job details also highlight all the various time elements along with scrap rates and the all important average time to produce a ‘good’ part which is imperative to understand the profitability of a job and highlight any deficiencies for future batches.

Having a real-time view of machining has proven to be a boon to key production engineering staff, along with assistance from shopfloor supervisors, who also have access to the system. The machine monitoring function is integrated with the company’s email system and this has made a massive improvement in communications between production engineers, machine shop supervisors, the tooling section and machine operators. For example, in the event of a machine breakdown, messages are automatically sent to both maintenance and production engineers, so all parties involved are immediately kept right up to date.

One of the very first things highlighted by NMS was just how much time operators spent waiting for tools. After studying various operating periods on different machines and examining specific job details, it became clear that tooling delays were a major contribution to low machine utilisation.

Once the awareness was flagged-up, a remedy was devised through the setting up of a special tooling section with its own Seiki Systems terminal, adjacent to production engineering. Here, kits of tool are now prepared to job lists taken from the software. A job cannot be queued until the tooling is available and this has been cleared on the schedule. “Delays due to lack of tooling are now virtually a thing of the past,” maintains Tony Cave.

While Integrated Hydraulics has no direct comparisons with recorded machining performance even for just a few years ago, simply because it had no access to such data. In reality it’s in no doubt as to return on the investment from the system and achieving a 70 per cent machine utilisation is a figure most production machine shops would go green with envy to have

Having invested some £500,000 in the last 18 months on new machine tools and currently installing the first Mori Seiki NH 400 DGG twin-pallet horizontal machining centre in the UK, Marquin Engineering Co., of Heathtown, Wolverhampton, took advantage of the free-of-charge DNC package offered to new machine purchasers by Seiki Systems of Brighton.

Maintains joint managing director George Spencer: “We knew we had to improve our CNC program management, control of programs and traceability as part of capitalising on our investments in machine tools, so we investigated the Free of Charge offer from Seiki Systems, and found that one of the products was ideally suited to our needs. As the offer from Seiki Systems included all the management software, together with commissioning to the new Mori Seiki machine, it was a relatively low cost to add on extra machines so we decided to place an order to extend the Seiki Systems software across our other eight CNC machines.

Marquin Engineering runs its five horizontal machining centres, one a large 630 mm by 630 mm pallet machine, a Chiron F208 vertical machining centre and three, two-axis 8, 10 and 12 inch chuck lathes 24 hours/day through Monday to Friday. It supplies a wide customer base from military communications, railway electrication and track, commercial vehicle suspension, off-road vehicle, hydraulic valve and transmission customers with batches of work that range from 50 to 3,000 units a day.

With this type of work, CNC machining programs can often be large and complex and with very frequent set ups on the shopfloor, management of the CNC program is critical in order to maintain control of what is happening and get the highest utilisation of the machine. But as George Spencer adds: “We need to be more efficient and attention to detail sends a strong message to our customers that we are a professional business.”

With brother Edward, George Spencer brought the business from their parents three years ago and pursued an ‘invest to progress’ policy. “We can compete against low wage economies with technology,” maintains George Spencer, “by utilising our 15 people to work effectively, take advantage of our investment in hydraulic fixturing to combine operations, reduce the number processes and hence lead time. With a new Brown & Sharpe DEA co-ordinate measuring machine as well, we can guarantee quality and our growing order book is an endorsement that what we are doing is competitive and right.”

The Seiki Systems DNC offer was not an abridged version of the software with limited use restriction but a fully functional, including installation, training and three months support package, that could be worth up to £6,000 per installation. The top level module, for instance, can provide machine monitoring, remote information data collection and alarms.

In addition, work planning and job queue management can be installed by Seiki Systems to reduce the delays in gaining the current information on the shopfloor by word of mouth and reducing the mountains of paper work that can be generated in a production environment.

As from April 2004, Seiki Systems will be offering a unique ERP and real time scheduling system developed by Fauser AG in Germany.

The scheduling system (Job Dispo MES) is totally integrated with Seiki Systems Manufacturing System to provide dynamic work queues for machine operators and to feed back live production data to enable real time dynamic updating.

The scheduling system can be used to manually enter jobs or supplied with an ERP system (Job Dispo ERP) ideally suited for SME's (Small to Medium enterprises) or with a configurable data base interface module (Job Dispo EAI) to interface to the MRP systems of larger organisations such as SAP, BAAN, etc

The addition of this product range enables Seiki Systems to provide all the modules of a complete Manufacturing Execution System from orders direct to the shop floor information and back

www.fauser-ag.com

As of the beginning of 2004, Seiki Systems has formed an exclusive partnership with Chicago based JobPack Inc. to provide systems to the USA market.

The product comprises of the Seiki Systems core DNC Communications engine which has been purchased by Jobpack in the USA under an exclusive licence agreement from Seiki Systems and further developed by JobPack in the USA to specifically meet the requirements of the USA market.

JobPack Inc saw no point in re inventing a very good wheel when they can get one that is specifically designed for the purpose, works well, is extensively proven and contains a number of features that had not been available to the US Market until now.

The system customisation to meet the USA market requirements and actual jobpack application were developed in the USA using Jobpack's own staff As such all the features of Seiki Systems software is available in the USA, developed to meet USA requirements and fully supported by Jobpack's own USA staff

For more info www.jobpack.com

The Wireless DNC System provides wireless communications between each CNC and a centralised remote PC. For the system to operate, a centralised wireless access point is installed in an Ethernet network connecting to the remote PC and each machine tool is equipped with a wireless access point. For machine tools with an RS232 interface, the wireless access point is integrated to a serial interface module which is then connected to the CNC by an RS232 cable.

For further information, please contact our team on 01273 680411 or email

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Updated every 30 seconds, the modular Seiki Systems ‘real time’ Graphical Work Planning Board (GPB) is able to provide a live visual display of what is happening to production schedules on the shopfloor. Indeed, with a full integration and two-way communication capability, the new system is able to transform the data from existing MRP/ERP scheduling systems into a dynamic real time planning facility automatically updating as the time and W.I.P changes, thus providing information for advanced decision making in order to maintain production schedules.

Now available from Seiki Systems of Brighton, GPB overcomes one of the major criticisms of MRP/ERP systems which from a manufacturing perspective tend to be regarded purely as generators of ‘work to’ lists based on due date. This means they are usually retrospective and are normally only updated, through the completion of a work docket from the operator or supervisor. Instead of providing a live picture, these systems tend to provide historic information with little or no help to maintain the production requirements, often resulting in a waste of valuable production time or resource in the event of problems.

Ideal for any CNC machine tool based batch production, the GPB provides a graphical display of the planned work for each machine in real time. It shows jobs on time and immediately highlights late predictions with automatic updates as the jobs progress, it even accounts for shift patterns to depict projected lead and finish times. The full implication of new or unplanned jobs or maintenance for instance can be visualised on the graphical work plan as well as the effect of moving jobs to other machines or instigating split batch working.

The jobs allocated for each machine are distributed to the operators in an electronic format to eliminate paper based job queue tickets. The electronic work queues are interactive to enable other departments to add information relative to the commencement of individual jobs, e.g. material available, queues available tools set etc. One advantage of the electronic work queue integrated to the GPB is that whenever a change is instigated, all departments are immediately updated so that their own priorities can change.

At any time, the jobs allocated against each machine can be interrogated to check if critical manufacturing data e.g. the NC program or drawing exists. If it does not, a warning is displayed on the GPB and distributed work queue and details of the shortages are automatically sent to the responsible department.
In addition, through the communication interface, when an operator selects a job from the queue, the manufacturing data can be automatically displayed.

With the inclusion of Seiki Systems “optimiser” package which has access to tooling information, it will recommend the best order to produce jobs on a machine, based on using any fixed tooling present and minimising the tool exchanging between jobs, hence minimising setting times for maximum productivity.

Building its manufacturing software solutions sales team against a background of experience in understanding work queuing, integration of production data from a wide variety of processes and in-depth knowledge of CADCAM and direct numerical control (DNC), Seiki Systems has appointed Neil Saunders as Southern Area Sales Manager.

Neil Saunders has transferred to Seiki Systems from parent aerospace contractor Kenard Engineering, which acquired the company last year. Prior to this, Neil spent some 23 years covering most aspects of the contract machining business. Now 39, he was intimately involved in an early Seiki Systems installation at Kenard in 1994 and had major input to the operation of a Kenard developed system, Kenard Information and Data Collection System (KIDS).

With this production-based background General Manager David Trowell maintains: "Neil will be able to offer a true application and problem solving service to customers in order to provide them with a solution that will meet their current and future production needs"

New software that enables strict control and full traceability of computer programmes transferred to CNC machine tools, thus assuring users that they are fully compliant with the rigid BS, ISO and other high level quality standards, has been developed by Seiki Systems of Brighton.

Not only does the Quality Level DNC software provide automatic control over program access, status, revisions, editing and usage, it warns of unproven program requests, is able to automatically communicate in real time the status, changes and operator actions with production supervision, production control, programming office, design and quality control.

The software provides 24 hour records with full traceability of program usage, machines involved and batch details, and can be installed either though a wired or wireless environment. Available at a price that compares with conventional up and download program transfer systems Quality Level DNC will even initiate remote warnings when problems arise.

Seiki Systems has established a strong working relationship in many of the UK’s medical, aerospace, defence and leading OEM and subcontractors for its capability to provide machine tool monitoring and production technology software with real-time based communications. Following this development strategy of providing ‘specific problem solving’ solutions, the introduction of Quality Level DNC creates for the first time, in a production environment, the confidence to a user that the company can easily comply and work within the strict requirements of the relevant quality approval standards.

David Trowell, General Manager of Seiki Systems maintains: “While manufacturers make every attempt to adhere to the relevant quality standards, they tend to rely on paper-based recording systems which can become ineffective, error-prone and do not respond in a real-time situation.Audit and traceability records of any changes created on the shopfloor such as gauge control, for instance, tend to be well maintained, however this is a rare occurrence for CNC programs which can mean companies are contravening their hard won approval standards. Says David Trowell: “Program usage should be recorded and any changes approved by management with the relevant engineering department advised when any unproven program is being used. In addition, information should be fed back to CAD/CAM personnel so the CNC source code can be checked after shopfloor edits have been made.”

Quality Level DNC automatically ensures status control is maintained for any CNC program. It prevents unauthorised use, is configurable to automatically communicate changes made on the shopfloor and can provide automatic edit checking and issue control.