MT Connect is a manufacturing standard to assist with the collection of data from machine tools across the shop floor. This data can be analyzed to determine the health of your business. MT Connect is offered on various machine tools including Sodick and OMAX equipment, both sold and supported by Brooks Associates. Both machine tool manufacturers have worked to integrate MT Connect into their equipment to allow business owners to monitor machine tool utilization including completed parts, downtime, cycle time, and productivity. This can be extremely helpful in tracking consumable consumption and ensuring replacement parts are ordered at the appropriate time. In addition to knowing when to order more consumables another potential use is tracking the value of a new consumable company. Should you start ordering lower priced consumables from a new company MT Connect can be used to track whether you see an increase in downtime as a result or not. This will better allow you to decide if you’re really getting a good deal with those cheaper parts or whether it’s costing you money in lost production.
Many business owners are also using this data to determine equipment purchases. By knowing exactly what your machine utilization is at you can better decide whether to purchase additional equipment, add another shift, or cut back. This information can also be helpful in deciding what machine to buy. If you consistently see that one brand of equipment has more down time than maybe it’s worth looking at a different OEM for the next machine purchase. As MT Connect becomes even more of an industry standard the monitoring tools it offers will continue to be expanded. Both OMAX and Sodick have seen the benefits and invested early in making their equipment MT Connect compliant to ensure their customers have access to this industry leading data retrieval system. Data collection and analysis is not unique to manufacturing every industry is seeing the benefits of being able to make better informed decisions. Everyone from Google to Facebook to OMAX and Sodick are increasing their use of data gathering and you can certainly expect more data points to be collected in the future and more manufacturers to integrate their software with this system.