Digital doorman

Worldline has pressed the ‘go-live’ button on its WL Digital Doorman IIoT solution at the Siemens site in Congleton.

This cyber-security platform ensures fully secure and transparent machine access management for vendors and service staff. The service contract spans a period of five years and has the potential of being offered to an additional 20 Siemens locations across the UK. Siemens at Congleton is the first installation of WL Digital Doorman in the UK, and is underpinned using a platform based on over 15 years of expertise and heritage in this area.
For further information https://worldline.com/

Fawcett achieves balance with XYZ

Delivering a balanced machining portfolio that matches present and predicted workflows is the current investment policy of A Fawcett Precision Engineers. This ethos at the Elland, West Yorkshire company gained fresh impetus when Joanne Thompson took over the running of the company following her father’s retirement in 2009.

“We had a wide range of lathes when I took over the business, but all of them were manual and many were getting old and creating bottlenecks in production,” she says. “To address this, in 2012 we bought a second-hand CNC lathe, along with a new SLX 555 ProTurn lathe from XYZ Machine Tools. And, while the XYZ SLX 555 is still with us and working well, the old CNC lathe had seen better days and needed replacing.”
As a result, March 2019 saw the arrival of a new XYZ TC400 turning centre with Siemens 828D ShopTurn control. The machine has a maximum swing of 600 mm and is the largest turning centre in the XYZ range.
During the summer, following Thompson’s participation and graduation from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme, the incentive and confidence was there for more investment, resulting in a further order being placed with XYZ Machine Tools. The company ordered the latest ProTurn lathe, an RLX425 with RX ProtoTrak control, which was delivered in July.
“You have to be realistic and confident about what you can do for customers and not promise something you can’t deliver, which is why we’ve continued to focus on low-to-medium batch quantities in sectors where we have extensive experience,” says Thompson. “The XYZ machines meet our needs perfectly for this type of work. Having the machines has made us more cost-effective, reduced our labour costs and helped us become more competitive.”
For further information www.xyzmachinetools.com

UMATI takes centre stage in Thailand

At the end of last month, 48 leading German companies from the machine tool and metalworking industries were guests at Metalex in Bangkok.

Metalex is the largest metalworking trade fair in the ASEAN region and, for the first time, Germany had been named a partner country. The German presentation focused on an industry exhibition and a joint stand, showcasing UMATI (universal machine tool interface). The ‘UMATI@Metalex’ special show featured three machines from DMG Mori, Heller and Trumpf, which were connected for live production at the event.
For further information https://vdw.de/en/

Intelligent solutions for tomorrow

At the recent EMO 2019 exhibition in Hanover, Tornos presented intelligent and interactive solutions that it says not only meet customer needs, but also anticipate them.

Beyond machines, Tornos offers production workflow solutions, including its Industry 4.0-enabling TISIS software, which allows programming and communicating directly with the machine. The user is guided intuitively to ensure optimal use of all available tools.
On Tornos’ stand, expert engineers and R&D team members demonstrated the range of possibilities offered by the intelligent software, which the company is constantly developing for connected production.
Additionally, Tornos was among 50 machine tool manufacturers from all over the world demonstrating at EMO how UMATI – universal machine tool interface – makes machine data usable. Today’s customers expect to integrate new machines into their own information technology (IT) ecosystems without any difficulty whatsoever.
The networking of machines, systems and software is one of the most important trends in manufacturing right now. Today’s customers expect to be able to integrate new machines into their own information technology (IT) ecosystems with no difficulty. UMATI does this easily, quickly and securely on the basis of the Open Platform Communications (OPC) Unified Architecture (UA) international interoperability standard.
For over two years, a team of various machine-tool manufacturers has been working on developing this uniform language for machine tools. Together with control manufacturers, the companies aimed at making it as user friendly as possible. Along with all other UMATI project participants, Tornos was connected to a central dashboard. Furthermore, 18 software and data evaluation service providers demonstrated how this information could be used to generate added value for customers.
For further information www.tornos.com

Assisting in quest for highest quality

NEMA Ltd, a manufacturer of motors, actuators and electromechanical assemblies, has invested in the latest Keyence IM series measurement system.
Andy Wilding, managing director at NEMA Ltd, says: “Aiming for, and indeed maintaining, the highest possible standards is an absolute necessity for us. We were committed to investing heavily in our inspection facilities, and had already identified areas where we felt improvements could be made.”

Companies involved in the aerospace industry face very stringent inspection requirements. These needs can be time consuming, putting a bottleneck on production, reducing productivity and, ultimately, costing money. In some cases, they may even provide a barrier to dealing with some of the larger tier-one companies.
With the IM series, more accurate measurements can be made and, in a short space of time, bottlenecks can be eliminated and costs reduced, says the company.
“With new equipment and a controlled environment, we felt the IM series was a key device for us to acquire,” continues Wilding. “In a nutshell: it matched our needs perfectly.”
The IM series image dimension measurement system was selected because of its range of specialist measurement tools, its built-in dimensional reporting feature and its speed of operation, among other criteria. These features all play a role in NEMA’s design, development and repair of electric motors and electro-mechanical assemblies. In addition, the image-measurement system allows NEMA personnel to measure more accurately than before.
“This Keyence device has proved essential to satisfy the needs of our varied customer base, which includes a number of tier-one aerospace companies,” concludes Wilding.
For further information www.keyence.co.uk