Increasing Shop Productivity with OnTakt Machine Monitoring Software

By Hartwig

OnTakt enables machine shops of all sizes to easily leverage data to increase productivity and profitability. Every shop should be able to implement new technologies that enable simple and intuitive management of shop floor activities. Manage production in real time with a simple interface.

-Easily connect machines in a single dashboard.

-Capture data & visualize operations to react on the shop floor.

Full Video Transcript

Hello everyone, we’re here today just outside Austin, Texas at Wolfram Manufacturing. They say that if your machines have an up time of above 85%, you’re world class as far as automation is concerned. Wolfram operates above 90% most of the time.

When most people think of automation they think of big robotic cells, pallet loaders, pallet changers, that type of thing. Wolfram uses OnTakt software which they developed out of necessity along with various Caron Engineering products to keep their shop running at peak efficiency. Let’s see how they do it.

So Wolfram is a dozen years old at this point. We started it based on working at some kind of awesome shops, like shops full of craftsmen, shops that are the eighth-wonder-of-the-world kind of manufacturing operations, shops that keep airplanes in the sky, and everything else.

We started Wolfram and the idea was to make a manufacturing environment that people wanted to be a part of. And that’s not just like free cookies and bean bags and stuff. It’s to try and do everything we can to let the machines be the machines and the people be the people, and that ends up adding a lot of automation, very little robots.

We love robots, we use robots, so there’s this much automation that’s robot and this much automation that is sensors, controls, and feedback software that lets us see everything at once. Software that lets one operator come in on the weekend and see that he’s got six incoming tool changes and one machine that was stopped automatically, so he knows he’s going to have to do some troubleshooting. That part of the vision was there right from the beginning. So even as we were doing that like real job shop work, the parts of the automation like closed loop feedback to protect the machines (these are like the Caron Engineering Systems, TMAC, and AutoComp). We had that on the machine from day one and I believed that it was going to do a better job protecting our equipment than what any person we brought in to run the equipment was ever going to be able to do.

Take it for what it is: If we asked any one of those guys in the shop (guys or gals), if we launched a job and we said, “Hey we’re all heading out for the day, you’ve got this machine for the rest of the day and just so you know TMAC’s not protecting it.” You would see them just go white as a sheet. It would be terrifying.

Now the machines have our own software called OnTakt, which watches all the machines. It watches all the Caron systems, it watches additional sensors, it brings all the data together, and when any issue comes up, the machines politely raise their hand and they send us a message in Teams that says, you know like, “Hey LB1’s got a tool change coming up in a little while.” When you have time go ahead and come over and take care of it.

So, I use OnTakt everyday to check in on the shop when I am here and when I am at home. I can see my daily goals. I can see the trend lines, if we’re going to actually make the parts that we need to make or not for the day. I can also kind of answer the first few questions of what went wrong. So on this screen, I can see each of my machines and if they are running or not based on their colors. The green fades to gray when it does stop. Instead of kind of that flashing of you know it’s wrong or right, you can see a little alarm down here, but it’s not anything that causes me to panic. The blue line is our goal for the day. That’s our line that we’re trying to hit. The green line is the actual and then there’s this really light dotted line that shows you kind of where we’ll end up. So you see on this machine that will hit right about gold today. On this machine we’ll make well over goal as long as we keep running like we have been, and this machine is a little a little bit behind goal today. We had some downtime which I can record (and one of my guys told me this morning it was). I can go report the downtime which was a breakdown, basically, coolant top off. Stop, add that in, and then when I go back to my main screen, I can see that downtime and it is accounted for. A downtime also assigned a cost to it. So the value of that stoppage and how long it was, makes making the decisions about where you’re going to put money next so much easier.

I would do the software first, then I believe in TMAC. But the software can tell you about you 100 other types of automation that you should be adjusting or deploying.

For more information on OnTakt software, Caron Engineering products, Wolfram, anything else you saw in this video you can email us at info@hartwiginc.com.