SECO Tools Selects MachineMetrics for Manufacturing Analytics and Industry 4.0 Transformation

(MachineMetrics: Northampton, MA) -- As part of a global initiative to ensure the continued success of its customers, SECO Tools is expanding its customer service capabilities through a partnership with MachineMetrics, whose manufacturing analytics engine will provide SECO and its customers with a technological resource for advancement into Industry 4.0.

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“SECO has always been committed to providing our customers with the best products and services available,” says Ben Alexander, business manager of online services at SECO Tools. “Partnering with MachineMetrics will allow us to not only continue to help our customers learn about themselves but will also transform our ability to help them improve their machine tool utilization and production capacity.”

SECO plans to use MachineMetrics’ industrial IoT platform and its manufacturing analytics applications as a cornerstone in its expansion into new technology services. With data provided by MachineMetrics, SECO can apply its extensive experience and engineering capabilities to the continuous improvement of its customers by helping them make data-driven decisions to improve their efficiency and bottom lines.

Leveraging SECO’s experience in tooling with MachineMetrics’ data-collection capabilities will help both SECO and MachineMetrics customers gain a deeper understanding of what’s happening with their tools in real time. These insights may include predicting tool life, preventing tool breakages, and feed and speed optimization.

“This partnership offers an exciting opportunity for both MachineMetrics and SECO Tools to demonstrate the value of data-driven manufacturing and analytics to SECO Tools users around the world,” says Bill Bither, CEO of MachineMetrics, “Together, we can uncover industry-first insights into machine tool and tooling optimization that will enhance the availability and reliability of machines for customers.”

With the MachineMetrics production monitoring application, SECO will enable its global customers to gain visibility into their production using an easy, do-it-yourself, completely customizable manufacturing machine monitoring system. As a cloud-based platform, MachineMetrics allows manufacturers to collect, monitor, and analyze data from any and all types of machines, from anywhere and with any internet-connected device to track overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) performance, identify production bottlenecks, take action with real-time notifications, predict and prevent costly downtime events, measure process improvements, and enhance shop floor communications.

The historical and real-time machine data collected by MachineMetrics allow tooling manufacturers like SECO to gain insight into customers’ machine tool health, identify new service opportunities with analytics and reporting, predict and deliver early warnings of potential machine or tooling failures, highlight elevated risk areas that lead to machine downtime, or even determine to take preventive action before risks impact a customer’s machine performance. The information will also provide the necessary data for SECO engineers to better design tools and to cost-engineer tooling more efficiently.

“MachineMetrics has provided us valuable insight into our own custom products facility in Troy, Michigan, allowing us to reduce our lead-time while improving on-time delivery and quality,” says Rob Keenan, president of SECO Tools North America. “Now, by partnering with MachineMetrics, we see the opportunity to do the same for our customers. By analyzing data output from machine tools, we can deploy our technical experts to work closely with our customers to identify bottlenecks and other issues that lead to extended machine downtime. MachineMetrics is another tool that enables SECO to take cost out of our customer’s operation while improving their productivity.”

Despite the excitement surrounding digital manufacturing transformation, the majority of manufacturers still do not have visibility into their production. This lack of transparency leads to underutilized equipment, production inefficiencies, and communication problems that prohibit most manufacturers from optimizing their production capacity. The only way to solve these problems is by capturing data, which is the primary driver behind SECO’s partnership with MachineMetrics.

While other monitoring solutions can take months to integrate, more than half of MachineMetrics customers are able to install the monitoring application themselves and start capturing data within 24 hours. Based on machine controls and types, MachineMetrics’ unique ability to connect to any type of machine through the control allows users to monitor as many as 100 machine aspects, such as temperatures and pressures of loaders, what line of code is running, the current tool in use, and much more.

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