MTConnect's data revolution starts by enabling fast, easy and low-cost access to manufacturing information. The next step: applying machine intelligence.
Winning with the MTConnect communication standard involves a two-step procedure. "After a plant is equipped with MTConnect compliant machine tools, software solutions provide the analysis that enables the performance and productivity gains of asset management," says Jim Braun, vice president, product development and standardization, MAG Industrial Automation Systems.
"By establishing a standard data interface, regardless of the equipment supplier, MTConnect simplifies the means to analyze plant and equipment status. Compliance with MTConnect allows data sources to understand each other regardless of vendor origin."
Braun, a member of the advisory group of the MTConnect project, says production equipment normally adheres to proprietary communication standards. "That typically results in production environments where machines can't talk' to each other. Compliance with MTConnect solves that problem."
The MTConnect standard also presents advantages to those choosing to enter the analytical software market, says Braun. Before the MTConnect standard was announced at last year's IMTS show, analysis software would have required a separate interface to communicate with each brand of machine tool. Indeed that was the solution adopted by MAG's Infimatic Div. when it introduced its Freedom eLog production monitoring software earlier in the decade.
