Does your machine shop run at maximum efficiency? Do you know how your machines and tooling are performing? If the answer is no or you’re not sure you need to talk to Nathan Byman at Wolfram Manufacturing. Wolfram Manufacturing runs what is best described as a production technology lab, which is both a working machine shop and a technology consulting firm helping OEM’s with tools like adaptive machining. Founded in 2011,Wolfram was an extremely versatile machine shop that specialized in medium to high volume production of metal parts. Wolfram focused on using the best technology manufacturing had to offer and appealing to the next generation of engineers. Still operating a full production shop, Wolfram has expanded to offer consulting, training, and distribution of 3rd party hardware & software solutions to help their customers reach the next level. Wolfram Manufacturing exists as a place where ideas, innovation, and practical application come together to make the manufacturing world better. As Tony Gunn from MTDCNC discovers they are working with Caron Engineering, a leading provider of tool monitoring, automation, and process control systems for the manufacturing industry. Caron’s growing product line of smart technology combines high-precision sensors with advanced monitoring capability to reduce cycle times, promote unattended operation, eliminate human-error, drive down tooling costs, and minimize expensive damage to machines and work-holding. Together they have created an unbelievable modular, real time Production Management System.

Full Video Transcript

Tony: Hello and welcome back to MTDCNC my friends, thank you so much for tuning in. I’m with my buddy Nathan today and we’re going to talk about a unique system called OnTakt. It’s a production monitoring system that I’m about to learn a bit more about created by Wolfram here in Austin Texas, and this unique capability of this software might benefit you as well which is why I’m excited to share this opportunity with Nathan with the audience and with myself even to learn a bit more, so Nathan thank you so much, I always appreciate your time let’s learn a little bit more about this system.

Nathan: All right thanks, Tony. Okay so OnTakt is like you said, it’s kind of a production management production operating system for shops, and that encompasses seeing what your production is. There are a lot of different things to do production monitoring, but it also brings in tool tracking notifications from different subsystems on the machines like the Caron engineering products, and it also brings in inspection so these are all different modules that you can enable. The cool thing is they’re all built to work together, so the more you use, the different components, the more value it provides to your shop. I’ll show you just a little bit of the concepts that that go into it that make it different even starting on just the machine monitoring side.

Tony: I’d love to see some more about it. There’s, like you mentioned, there’s a lot of machine monitoring ERP systems out there, so to know something unique created by you I am intrigued (or created by Wolfram), I am intrigued to learn some more about it.

Nathan: When you look at a lot of machine monitoring systems you might see things like just a color-coded chart of the machine running or not running through the day, or you end up with a bunch of cards representing machines and they’re all different colors, and I call this just like the disco ball. Like if I am a shop owner or I’m an operations manager, and you’re looking at what is the action, like at what point do I need to stop planning on the call that I’m about to make to negotiate something and get up and go focus on the shop floor. We try and distill it down into real signals so the disco ball – that doesn’t do a whole lot for me. There are a lot of those formats if I’m just looking at a bunch of percentages, oh man, it turns out people are not great at looking at numbers picking out the highest, ordering them in their head, and taking action, it takes a lot of extra mental processing to do that. So, you end up with what we have here. This concept is something that we borrowed from kind of the theory of constraints where you keep your drum going, whatever your constraint is, you keep it on pace, and if that’s on pace then everything else is okay. So if I were to look at these, each one of these is representing a machine and what we see at a glance in this thumbnail, this blue line is the pace that we expect to be producing parts, so I’m not looking at the machine running or not, that is represented by the color over here, but what I’m looking at is if I’m dropping off parts at the pace that I’m expecting to, so if I have a target line that I have set for this particular part then I have my parts being produced as long as my slope is parallel to that line. Just mentally glance at it and these things are chasing the same targets. So, I’m comfortable with the production on these machines. Now we’re part way through the day, and there is a forecast line on each one and I see, okay we’re going to be pretty close to a normal good finish on this one. We’re going to be ahead of target on this one. This one’s going to come in ahead of target, this one maybe a little low, none of these are super concerning but it lets you glance at it and immediately start planning when do I need to take action. Do I need to get up right now? It’s running, so maybe I get out there in a few minutes. The longer it’s not running, that forecast line is just going to tilt down and down and down, so it’s a way to very quickly absorb what is going on with the shop. So, if my line was under my target entirely but the slope is the same, they got a late start, you know the next time I’m out there I want to talk to somebody and figure out why we got a late start, but it gives me a lot of additional context just the way the lines are shaped 

Tony: Through forecasting?

Nathan:  Yes. So that’s great and I can jump into any one of these machines, and we were looking at one of these machines earlier, and we jump into a machine’s individual production page. We can see all kinds of different patterns, so this is an entire week of production on a machine, and this is what an automated process will look like. So, these are stops for bar changes primarily. I can also overlay when tool changes were made and machine alarms and just about anything else so a lot of those were low level alarms. Now if I come over to something like this, this is a much lumpier production and this is something without automation, so this cycle time is similar to that other part, but we end up with 120 parts and no work across the weekend versus something like this where we get you know 700 plus parts and a nearly smooth production series all the way through the weekend. So, yeah, those visualizations are nice.  Now I’ll jump over to another thing that we’ve got here which is tooling, and that’s why I consider this a lot more than just seeing how the machines are running. So, this is basically the tools for every program that is loaded in the entire shop right now, and I can order it by where they are at in their life. So, if I’m scanning through the parts, I’ve got on this machine LB3 I’ve got two parts remaining before these parts need to be changed.

Tony: What am I looking at there when I see two of four corners used? 

Nathan:  Okay, so indexable tools we can tell it how many corners they have and instead of changing the tool, you will just index it and get more life. So, it’ll let you know when you are officially done with that tool.

Tony:  Is all of this connected to the Caron engineering products as well?

Nathan:  It is.  So, people could be looking at individual machines or every machine in the shop. If somebody stops in on the weekend, and they’re just going to do a high level you know what tools I need to change, they can come here and see it.

Tony: To me this is obviously faster than going out to each machine and looking at everything individually. But I also look at this and go, well there’s a lot of information coming in as well which could also take a lot of time, is there a way to glance at it and go well everything’s running smoothly or I have one or two problems, because obviously we could deep dive into this and look at every tool and every machine and everything that goes along with it but if I’m walking in on a Monday and I got to get something done right, can I just pull this up and get a home screen that says everything’s okay or you better go check out this one machine, because you got an alarm, and then be able to go solve that and then get back to the deep diving maybe later in the day. When I’m trying to figure out how to constantly make my processes better for sure. and 

Nathan:  We actually have one step better than that.  So, the machines when they reach a point where they actually need something done, they reach out to us, and they talk. So, this is Slack, and it is it’s just like Microsoft Teams, which is just like group chat. So, each one of our machines has a channel that it talks to us through and if I just look at this one you know it’s posting out shift reports. It posts out if there was an alarm you know door interlock just about everybody tries to go before the door is all the way closed if there’s inspection on the built-in where we’re doing a probe cycle we have some of that report out directly for key features just to let us know this one had a total indicated run out of eleven thousand on a particular feature that we’re doing there. So, we will have them when they cross a tooling threshold the different tools we have set, so when there are 10 parts left or 20% left or whatever threshold we set it will notify us that you need to go take action on that machine. 

Tony:  And Nathan is this happening simultaneously all the time its receiving information sending you messages you immediately get the updates or alerts if necessary. And I’m even i see you shaking your head, and I want to give you a chance to answer these appropriately, but I’m also intrigued by I’m looking at this screen right now and uh it says one extreme alarm saves $207, this is also calculating cost savings, this is amazing.

Nathan: It is it is so that’s a one of the really fun parts when you start to bring different data together you get like these incredible opportunities. So, you know we’re running the parts and then with the Caron data coming in basically as we have alarms, we can calculate what the savings would be, and I’ve got kind of an interesting calculator here. 

Tony:  Almost feels a little bit like a video game, like I’m playing slots and I’m like hey I just got some savings all right you know that’s kind of fun. 

Nathan:  Exactly, so this cost savings calculator basically for anybody’s shop we customize it and when you have a Caron wear event or extreme event, we basically we say what could have happened if that alarm had not stopped the machine and what is the value of that. So, we put a value and then a frequency, so you know 1/250 times that you get an extreme alarm and this is probably very low. I’ll say it’s probably more frequent than this that you get a really when an extreme alarm happens you have avoided something very bad. So, 150 or one in 250 chances is very generous, but if you lose a spindle on something like an Okuma, between downtime and spindle and everything else you know, 20, 30, 40 dollars is not out of the realm of possibility. So a one in 250 occurrences we attribute that, and what that comes down to is each extreme alarm we give you credit for $120 saved now a lot of times when people are buying stuff for their shop and they’re trying to justify things – you see a big expense, you hear a lot of fancy commitments and what people say it’ll do and then when they come by like later in the year and they’re like okay can you justify all the things that you did. This is a way to justify it and you can talk through this change all the numbers for your own shop and make it just completely like deep in your heart you know that it is believable and then just watch the savings and the justification build.

Tony:  So for a guy like myself who is and if you wouldn’t mind just going back to that screen real quick… for a guy like myself who uh is learning about this technology, learning about this software, you mentioned that I can change it to whatever or wherever I feel comfortable with right now. We’re looking at a machine tool spindle ruined thirty thousand dollars one in 250 times that you save an alarm these are the mathematical calculations that you feel comfortable with and I can adjust those based on my own preferences, right? And the machine tool loses alignment five thousand dollars one out of a hundred so you’re playing the odds of what typically happens based on statistics and numbers and I can change it based on what I feel is the same. But regardless wherever we feel comfortable we constantly get a reminder it says hey by the way this could have cost you x amount of money and you just saved it because you didn’t happen and this is going to allow us to not even fully well it’s definitely going to help us understand why we purchased it, but be confident over and over again in the reasons we purchased it and just constantly look ourselves in the mirror and go I’m glad I did that, I’m glad I did that for this reason. I’m now looking at tool holder broken one in 25 chance $300.  I’m a big video game guy, I’m a big star wars guy, I think you are as well big marvel guy, so these types of things are entertaining to me and entertaining in a way that’s like a video game but in a practical life that allows me to feel like I’m doing good for me I’m doing good for my family, I’m doing good for others, I’m doing good for my company, and all of it is a constant reminder of like when we get those likes on social media or something where our placebo good job good job you’re doing the right thing good job.  I really like this aspect of your software and I know I’m a bit long-winded on it, but I think that’s because I’m excited about it.

Nathan:  Yeah it’s pretty cool, I mean we love it and it lets you look, I mean, at a in a lot of different ways you can look and see if people are struggling with something I mean if they keep hitting alarms man your process is not stable enough and I guarantee you just almost any shot people run and they will start to absorb the problems they will just make them go away however they can and it’s through their best efforts right like they’ll just they’ll start changing the inserts at the frequency that feels comfortable that feels comfortable for them that keeps the machine running they feel like they’re doing the right thing and on many levels they are you know but by the same token you want to know if your process isn’t stable so you know this is putting flags out there that hey you know you’re not as stable as you think you are. You need to come address this to make it easier for the person running the machine. Make it more profitable for everybody, so that’s how we like to look at things and the software really helps you do that.

Tony:  So, what else would you like to show me on this software before we conclude this incredible interview, because you know this type of mapping and forecasting and understanding of my shop. I mean I don’t own a shop like you do, but everywhere I go and everything I learned I think if I decided to start a shop it would immediately be profitable and maybe I’m just driving my ego into this conversation but learning things like this allows us to succeed from day one and even if we’ve had a shop for a century implementing this now gives us the information we think we know to either prove that we’re right or learn something new and become better. 

Nathan:  So, there’s one two more small things that I’ll highlight so when I say that you have different components and when they’re all working together you get incredible additional information, and you know some of the information can feel like overkill, but it all does kind of circle back. So, we’re tracking our tool changes in here, if I go to any individual part so I clicked on a part on that page I can see where each tool was in its life when it manufactured that part, so you know this was the 911th part out of a 1500-part life that that tool made. So, when you have quality issues you can go back and look very specifically what was the state of the machine and the tooling when you made that. Which I have not seen anywhere else. Now one other element here, this is the inspection side of it. So, you know there’s a lot of great inspection software out there right now. This is something we built we’ve been working with different inspection softwares for a long time okay we enter our data I’m not going to show the data input interface, but it’s fairly streamlined it presents you just with what you’re inspecting at the time of course it you know calculates all your SPC numbers and it trends things. This also if parts leave control will notify us so that we know to take action but part of the reason I show this it’s part of the software, but also it is like the third part of a super powerful thing that we have all contained which is the cutting force data from Caron. The actual like where tools are in their lives and then the dimensional output and that is kind of like the trifecta that lets you build the eventually kind of a like a holy grail flux capacitor of manufacturing. You know people keep trying to say like what data can I take and use to really forecast how tools perform and get into you know AI or machine learning, and those are the elements that you need, and that is what we’re bringing together so that’s down the road a little bit there’s a lot of fun different ways to use this but that’s something that you know just has us fired up for where we’re going in the future.

Tony:  And if people are as fired up as we both are and they want to learn more about this, how can they contact you, how can they find you, where’s your website, what’s your home address, what’s your social security number, how can they best find you Nathan? 

Nathan:  Yeah, so our website we try and do a good job keeping up to date, so it is wolframmfg.com.

Tony:  Well Nathan that was pretty awesome. I learned a lot today. I hope everyone who’s listening, who’s watching, has also learned a lot. There’s the website, give Nathan a call. Super super easy guy to talk to as you can tell, uh very well-articulated and thought out, so Nathan – thank you for sharing this information, on behalf of MTD, we do wish you continued success. 

Nathan: All right thank you.