ITAMCO - a manufacturer of precision-machined components, specializing in gears - is part of a team that received an Applied Research and Development award from the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII). The award-winning project is titled "Standards-Based Platform for Enterprise Communication Enabling Optimal Production and Self-Awareness," or SPEC-OPS.
"We are excited to continue to advance applied R&D within our core technology focus areas," said Dr. Dean Bartles, Executive Director of DMDII. "With each project call, we bring additional researchers, global industry leaders and small companies into our consortium and move closer to making technologies related to `smart manufacturing' and `brilliant factory' applicable to manufacturers across the country."
The goal of SPEC-OPS is to make smart manufacturing a reality by connecting and configuring diverse machine tools, PLCs, sensors and devices on the shop floor. Currently, on-site process data and machine controller data are disconnected from higher-level decision-making systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. SPEC-OPS will validate, integrate and enhance five major standards (ISA-95, MTConnect, UPnP, STEP ISO 13399, ISO 13374) to provide a standard-based communication platform that helps enable integrated predictive process control, dynamic scheduling, and process analytics with reduced implementation cost. The cost savings will be realized through asset discovery and location services with the goal of realizing a plug & play, near-zero configuration using real-time sensor and process data. Location services will allow devices to find each other and discover capabilities, to compute dynamic travel times as well as the proximity of mobile material handlers and manufacturing assets in near real-time.
The other partners in the project are Palo Alto Research Center, MTConnect Institute and System Insights. ITAMCO is the implementation site for SPEC-OPS. The MTConnect standard already connects many of ITAMCO's machine tools. "We are only 12 to 15 months away from a totally integrated shop floor. A job will be entered into our ERP system and then every piece of the job, from allocating materials, to manufacturing, to shipping and invoicing, will be automatically routed through the entire facility. Machines will be chosen based on the type of work and availability. And SPEC-OPS is dynamic - if a machine goes down, the job will be automatically rerouted," said Joel Neidig, Engineer and Lead IT Developer at ITAMCO.
"SPEC-OPS will make ITAMCO even more valuable to our customers in mining, oil and gas, aerospace and defense," said Neidig. "Our goal is to be a reliable and quality-driven resource in a customer's supply chain. We are appreciative of the award funding that makes this possible and we are enjoying the collaboration with Palo Alto Research Center, MTConnect Institute and System Insights."
For more information contact:
ITAMCO
6100 Michigan Road
Plymouth, IN 46563
574-936-2112
info@itamco.com
www.itamco.com