VIDEO: Innovative OEE Tracking System Reveals Machine Data to Reduce Downtime

Don Dumoulin, owner and CEO of Precise Tooling Solutions, talks with Akshat Thirani, co-founder and CEO of Amper Technologies, about how his shop is using a new data management software to increase productivity and reduce downtime.

Transcript

Don Dumoulin: One of the challenges you have in running a specialty manufacturing organization is knowing what kind of utilization you're getting out of your machines, and we struggled for years trying to find the right piece of software and the right equipment to help us understand what kind of spindle usage we were getting out of our machines.

It was so important, because we really needed to know the return on investment. We needed to know how many hours we were having in projects, and, most importantly, how much unmanned time we were getting each day.

We did a three-year search and looked at four or five different companies, and then I met Amper.

We were looking for three criteria as we were making our purchasing decision:

1. To bring capital costs as low as possible.
2. Monthly reoccurring costs.
3. Results from the software’s decision-making modules.

We look at the electrical heartbeat of a machine and use that as a signal to translate it into machine data, which allow shops to connect old and new machines, regardless of brand and type of equipment.

Akshat Thirani : Amper makes it really easy to track the shop floor. Here's what makes it really different: The traditional way has been to integrate all the machine controllers. We all know that on the shop floor, you have a mix of machines—some are new, some are old, different brands—that can be hard to integrate.

At Amper, we found a really interesting way of looking at the electrical heartbeat of a machine and using that as a signal to translate it into machine data,  like downtime. That has allowed shops to connect old and new machines, regardless of brand and type of equipment.

Don Dumoulin: Akshat and his team are brilliant scientists. The beauty of this system is that they've taken the electrical impulse of our machines and turned it into usable data.

So very quickly, we've been able to see the kind of productivity we're getting out of individual machines, out of individual operators, and allowing them to use that data to help us be more productive across the board. It's allowing us to pass savings on to our customers so that we win more jobs, and allowing us to see what the true return on investment of individual machines is.