Page 32 - MetalForming June 2014

Worldclass OEE
Lands at Supplier of Jet-Fighter Parts
Machine-to-machine monitoring catalyzes efforts to raise overall equipment effectiveness to world-class levels at Magellan Aerospace, saving the company more than $30,000/month in downtime-related costs.
BY JOHN RATTRAY
With more than 60 yr. of pro- ducing components for some of the most sophisticated supersonic jet-fighter aircraft in the world, longevity for the Magellan Aero- space plant in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, is partly due to its expertise in high-velocity hard-metal machining of titanium, Inconel and stainless steel. The firm manufactures major compo- nents for the futuristic F-35 Lightning II fighter, as well as landing gear and other key components for most major aerospace-OEM platforms.
The 135-employee, 100,000-sq.-ft. plant boasts of relentless pursuit of excellence, which recently led it to invest in new “shop floor to top floor”
John Rattray is vice president of sales and marketing at Memex Automation, Burlington, Ontario, Canada: 905/635- 1540; www.memex.ca.
Magellan’s continuous-improvement coordinator Jonathan Ung checks data gathered by the Merlin machine-to-machine communications platform.
software supplied by Memex Automa- tion, Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Its Merlin (Manufacturing Execution Real- time Lean Information Network) soft- ware is a manufacturing execution system and machine-to-machine communi- cations platform that provides real- time visible dashboard metrics.
Merlin executes work orders gen- erated by an ERP system and sends the results back to the central ERP data- base. Other functions include produc- tion data collection, downtime and reject-cause analysis, labor-productiv- ity tracking, usage-based preventive maintenance and visual production scheduling. Users, such as Magellan, leverage information captured by Mer- lin to increase production and income
from operations, while raising overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
Reduced Optional Machine Stops
Dave Quehl, Magellan Aerospace’s manager of technical services, over- saw installation of the Merlin software in 2011, and has it running on various machines throughout the plant. Con- tinuous-improvement coordinator Jonathan Ung is charged with track- ing the plant’s progress with Merlin; he has gathered very promising return- on-investment results.
“We deployed Merlin on our FMS/Makino cell,” says Ung, “which features four robot-controlled CNC machines. We also outfitted three
30 MetalForming/June 2014
www.metalformingmagazine.com