This video is Part 1 of 3. OnTakt, especially when combined with TMAC from Caron Engineering, can easily save you over $2,000 per machine per month. Reach out if you’d like a a live 30 minute demo to learn more.

OnTakt helps to manage consumable and durable tooling in every CNC inside a shop. With highly detailed data acquisition from a CNC machine we can help to clearly track what is happening with tool life in your shop. With data that is easy to access combined with clear graphical charts we can help you save money on tooling in your shop with Production Monitoring of your CNCs.

Full Video Transcript

Today I want to show you how we can save a shop over $2,000 per machine, per month by leveraging our OnTakt production management and machine monitoring software combined with TMAC from Caron engineering. Just a quick background if you’re not familiar with TMAC from Caron engineering. TMAC stands for Tool Monitoring and Adaptive Control. What it does is monitor the horsepower of a CNC, and it can detect when tools are worn or broken. We leverage TMAC here at our shop to run our machines 24/7 without operators. When a tool wears or breaks TMAC will stop the machine and our OnTakt software will send out a notification so someone on the shop floor can go attend to the machine. 

More info on TMAC: If you’d like to learn more we can also do in-person demos here at our own shop. Okay so what we want to do today is see how we can drive our tools farther into their life without being concerned about a tool breaking and damaging our parts or machines. Tool breakage can be very expensive but we’re going to just focus on tool life. So, what we want to do today is see how with Tool Life we can drive our tools farther into their tool life without being concerned about a tool breaking and damaging our parts or machines. Tool breakage can be very expensive but we’re going to just focus on tool life. So here with OnTakt let’s go look directly at the tools that are active in one of our Okuma LB3000s. 

Let’s start this demo. With this half inch End Mill as it’s the highest value tool for us to drive as far into its life as possible. OnTakt allows me to pull up the complete replacement history. Here in this view, I can see the tool life for every tool that we’ve run in this machine and information about its condition when it’s replaced as well as any contextual information that an operator might have provided. OnTakt automatically tells us the average tool life is 99 parts per tool which shows up around here on this chart. If we were to part count in a conservative way where we weren’t relying on TMAC we would probably set that around 60 parts per tool and likely even a little less but for this calculation, we’ll use 60. OnTakt manages all our tooling inventory so I can also click here on the inventory item and get the cost of the tool with these numbers.

Let’s look at what the cost savings will be when we drive tools until TMAC stops the machine.

Cost Savings: You can see here that I have the cost of the tool and from a monthly production report I pulled the number of parts that machine made in the month of March. From OnTakt we pulled the average actual use which was 99 parts and with an estimated number of parts at 60 if we’re going to use a more rudimentary tool counting method so the cost of the tooling per month when we can make 99 parts per tool is just under $2,500 and when we can make 60 parts per month it costs $4,000. The savings here every month on this machine from the single tool is just over $1,500.

So, two things: This is our highest value tool savings but it’s also not the only tool in the machine. So, I pulled the data for a few other tools, and we can see how to get to two thousand dollars per month savings. Once we bring in the actual data for these other tools, we can see that the cost savings are a little less, but we can also see that just looking at these four examples we can save two thousand dollars per month. But here’s the kicker: We have nine Tools in this machine we use two of these half inch end mills per machine four tools that have very similar life to our quarter inch endmill calculation, and we can see with real life data that we’ve just saved four thousand dollars per machine per month.

This is just one piece of building a Roi for TMAC combined with OnTakt. In future videos I’ll show you two additional ways that the combination of OnTakt and TMAC can pay for themselves very quickly. 

As always if you’d like to see a 30-minute demo of the software monitoring a live production shop reach out to us.