The VDMA is championing Industry 4.0 at CHINAPLAS 2017, where the German machinery association will be demonstrating how the smart factory is something every plastics processor can aspire to. There has been great interest in the Industry 4.0 concept by Chinese converters in recent years and in its second edition, the CHINAPLAS Industry 4.0 conference will demonstrate the systems that enable efficiency, connectivity and savings for manufacturers. The second Industry 4.0 Conference will take place over half a day on each of the first three days of the trade fair (May 16th-18th 2017), and has a sector-specific structure. Day one focuses on automotive, day two on electronics and day three on packaging. Key dimensions of Industry 4.0 were presented by VDMA and its member firms at K 2016. The focus now is on transferring the added value of digital technologies to foreign markets. Five of the firms due to give a presentation at the conference will show short films illustrating the benefits that Industry 4.0 can bring to their Chinese customers. AutomotiveThe automotive industry in China is growing. In 2016, sales of passenger cars stood at 24.4 million units, which represents an increase of 15.5 per cent. Growth in the market for electric vehicles is particularly strong. China produced 517,000 electric vehicles in 2016, 53 per cent more than in the previous year. By 2020, the market share of electric vehicles will have grown to 5 per cent. In order to be able to achieve these increases in production, manufacturing needs to be both flexible and efficient. Wage costs in China have risen sharply, as have the quality demands placed on plastic products in the automotive sector. As a result, Chinese converters have relied more and more heavily on automation and digitalisation in an effort to make their production more efficient. Exactly how smart technologies can help them to optimise individual steps in the production process and thereby achieve better manufacturing results will be demonstrated by KraussMaffei, ENGEL and KUKA on the first day of the conference. Individualisation of goodsChina is the world’s biggest producer of electronic goods. The domestic market for refrigerators or even PCs/laptops, for instance, is now virtually saturated and the pressure on costs is high. On the second day of the conference, dedicated to Electronics & Electrical Appliances, ARBURG and Wittmann Battenfeld will show how mass-produced goods can be manufactured efficiently. Products need to be smarter if market opportunities that go beyond providing a basic level of supply are to be developed. On the second day of the conference, the injection moulding machinery manufacturer ARBURG and the Chinese electrical appliances manufacturer Haier will discuss efficient ways in which mass-produced consumer goods can be individualised. PackagingThe food sector in China is booming. During the first 11 months of 2016, food production recorded year-on-year growth of almost 14 per cent. For Chinese food and beverage companies, annual growth up to 2020 is forecast to be around 8.8 per cent. In addition, a change in consumer habits means that more food packaging is required. At the same time, the hygienic and safe packing of food products is valued very highly by Chinese consumers. On the third day of the conference, Reifenhäuser and Brückner will show how Industry 4.0 can help to improve production efficiency for packaging manufacturers and to ensure that rising demands, for example with regard to food safety, are met. Panel debateStandardised digital interfaces are crucial to the implementation of Industry 4.0. Uniform information models will make the networking of machines more straightforward, and components from a number of different manufacturers can be combined more easily into systems. Following the series of presentations on the first day of the conference, representatives of KraussMaffei, KUKA and Motan will use the panel of experts debate to highlight the practical experience they have gained in this respect.
In its introduction on each day of the conference, VDMA will also examine the current status of the work in terms of the EUROMAP standardisation of digital interfaces. The official German pavilion at CHINAPLAS 2017 can be found in hall 5.1, stand 5.1A21. Source: eppm
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The German bunds gained Friday, following a lower reading of the country’s manufacturing and composite PMI.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year bond, which moves inversely to its price, fell nearly 1 basis point to 0.24 percent, the long-term 30-year bond yields also slipped around 1 basis point to 0.95 percent and the yield on short-term 2-year bond plunged 1-1/2 basis points to -0.80 percent by 08:40 GMT. The Markit Flash Germany Composite Output Index registered 56.3 in April, down from March’s near 6-year high of 57.1. This signaled the first easing in growth of private sector business activity since the start of the year, but still the second-fastest rate of expansion in over three years. Further, the ongoing strength of business conditions in manufacturing, in particular, was reflected in the headline Markit Flash Germany Manufacturing PMI coming in little-changed from March’s 71-month high of 58.3, at 58.2. Meanwhile, the German stock index DAX Index traded 0.02 percent lower at 12,025.00 by 08:50 GMT, while at 08:00GMT, the FxWirePro's Hourly Euro Strength Index remained neutral at 26.06 (a reading above +75 indicates a bullish trend, while that below -75 a bearish trend). Source: EconoTimes A CNC wood router works almost the same as any other CNC machine. A CNC machine or a Computer Numerically Controlled system which uses computer software and CNC controller electronics to drive a mechanical system. Using this setup, it is possible to achieve far better accuracy and precision than a human operator. A traditional CNC router can move and cut in three directions which are usually referred to at the X, Y, and Z directions. The X-axis is usually the longest of the three running front to back. The Y-axis runs from left to right while the Z-axis runs up and down. Below you can see each axis labeled respectively. These machines are very efficient in that they work in all three directions in near perfect unison, giving this machine the capability of carving complex shapes. Most CNC wood routers employ a gantry style design. This is where the whole Y-axis assembly is suspended above the cutting bed. The whole gantry assembly glides on a linear bearing assembly and moves along the X-axis. The base is of course the base of the machine that holds everything together. Strong demand for equipment in the manufacturing sector pushes up core private-sector machinery orders by 1.5 percent in February from the previous month. Core private-sector machinery orders rose a seasonally adjusted 1.5 percent in February from the previous month, boosted by robust demand for equipment in the manufacturing sector, government data showed Wednesday.
The orders came to ¥850.5 billion ($7.8 billion). These figures exclude orders from ships and utilities because of volatility in the sectors, widely viewed as an indicator of future capital spending by companies. The latest data followed a 3.2 percent fall in January. The Cabinet Office maintained its basic assessment that the recovery in machinery orders has slowed. “Although machinery orders have been going up and down (in recent months), the (recovery) trend has not changed on balance,” an official with the Cabinet Office said. A gain of about 10 percent will be needed in March for machinery orders to achieve a projected 1.5 percent increase in the January-March quarter, which the official said could be “difficult.” Orders from the manufacturing sector rose 6.0 percent to ¥350.8 billion, as strong growth in the pulp and paper sector as well as in food and beverages helped the total figure recover from a sharp fall. Orders from the nonmanufacturing sector advanced 1.8 percent to ¥516.6 billion, helped by higher demand for nuclear power equipment. Recovering exports have given a boost to the Japanese economy in recent months, although the outlook for capital spending remains unclear, according to analysts. Uncertainty persists over the future of U.S. economic and trade policies along with geopolitical risks following the recent military strike on Syria by the United States. Overseas demand for Japanese machinery, an indicator of future exports, dropped 1.1 percent to 870.9 billion. Total orders, including those from the domestic public sector and abroad, fell 1.3 percent to ¥2.21 trillion, marking the third straight monthly decline. Source: The Japan Times Nazareth Ekmekjian was on a tight deadline, and news from the machine shops wasn’t good. A designer for Boston-based Piaggio Fast Forward, a transportation and robotics subsidiary of Piaggio Group, Ekmekjian needed a prototype of a component made within a week and a half. But every shop he contacted said it would take at least two.
Finally, Ekmekjian found a company that could meet his deadline, and at half the cost. The difference? It didn’t own any machinery, but ran a network of equipment leased from manufacturers. “It was really simple,” Ekmekjian says. “I uploaded the geometry, provided a few specifications and they took care of the rest.” “They,” in this case, are the employees at MakeTime, a startup launched by architect turned manufacturing entrepreneur Drura Parrish in Lexington, Kentucky. Under a model known as distributed or on-demand manufacturing, MakeTime is meeting small businesses’ manufacturing needs in much the same way Uber meets the needs of passengers looking for rides. Companies, entrepreneurs, and inventors can rent time on nearby equipment, be it CNC milling machines, water jets, or laser cutters—any of which can cost from $50,000 to $250,000 apiece to purchase. The approach could have timely benefits. As US president Donald Trump continues to emphasize the importance of revitalizing manufacturing in America, distributed manufacturing could make that prospect more appealing by reducing lead times and costs. Taking advantage of idle gears An an architect, Parrish spent a lot of time creating custom items in machine shops, where he noticed how often expensive manufacturing equipment sat idle. As part of a Kentucky manufacturing family, Parrish knew this was a common problem. (His grandfather started Scott Industries—a contract manufacturer, Scott specializes in insulation cutting, HVAC vents, and pipes—in the 1950s.) On average, US manufacturing equipment sits unused about half the time. “If I’m a small US manufacturer and I have one machine, I might win a bid from Ford and they need three machines. I wouldn’t think twice about buying the other two machines” he explains. “But the economy shifts a lot faster. We’re not looking at 10-20 year production cycles anymore. It’s more like two years-plus.” Parrish says that’s how so many manufacturers end up overinvesting in equipment. Ironically, there’s also a large group of people—primarily small business owners—who need access to those machines but can’t afford to buy them. To solve that disconnect, Parrish started out by renting blocks of idle time from machine shops to artists and designers, and later to business owners and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Parrish says companies that use MakeTime can get things made in about a quarter of the amount of time it would take through a traditional process. “We streamline [the process], so 100 to 200 machine shops can operate with the same level of control as one,” he says. Jeff Rizzie, senior manager of business development at Sandvik Coromant, a major manufacturer of machine tools, says on-demand manufacturing provides “really good opportunities for the industry to start sharing resources and assets that have largely been wasted. If we can get to a marketplace where we are utilizing more machine capacity without buying more machines, that’s a good thing for everybody.” An industry ripe for change While many industries are profoundly changed since the emergence of the internet, manufacturing has been a holdout. Most of the industry is not digitized or standardized, meaning you can’t go to a factory with the manufacturing equivalent of a PDF—there’s no such thing. Different manufacturers use different descriptors, standards, and software. Smaller manufacturers often still rely on paper drawings. The process for sourcing manufacturing capability has also remained more or less unchanged for decades. A company that wants to make a bicycle wheel, for example, sends out requests to a few manufacturers, then waits weeks for price quotes. Add to that a global manufacturing chain with shipping times and port inspections and you have an inefficient process that can take months for even basic goods. “The industry exhibits a number of characteristics that show it’s susceptible to efficiency improvements on a major scale,” says Daniil Stolyarov at Almaz Capital, a venture capital firm that has invested in MakeTime. It can also be hard for buyers to find supply (i.e. machine time), even when there’s a lot of it, because of the many silos in manufacturing. Because of the way supply chains are set up, as well as the many certifications needed, a car parts maker isn’t likely to also manufacture parts for the oil and gas industry, even if the equipment and materials needed are similar. Shifting to an Uber model promises to break down what Seth Levine of Foundry Group, another MakeTime investor, calls “a misalignment of supply and demand in machining.” This year, particularly with the Trump administration’s renewed focus on US manufacturing, could be an inflection point. Rick Smith, CEO and co-founder of Fast Radius, an on-demand parts manufacturing company, sees 2017 as “a major tipping point” for the industry. Already, several large companies have made sizable investments into “on-demand” manufacturing. Last spring, UPS and SAP announced an initiative with Fast Radius to build an on-demand manufacturing supply chain that operates a network of 3D printers, CNC machines, and rapid-injection molding. A few months later, Alcoa opened a 3D printing metal powder production facility and in September, General Electric offered to pay $1.4 billion for two European 3D printing firms. Just the beginning For all the promise that distributed manufacturing holds, it’s still early days. “It’s extremely nascent, I would say in its infancy as a concept,” says Justin Rose, managing partner at Chicago-based Boston Consulting Group. “I find it hard to believe that a major automotive supplier would at some point have a production line entirely running [leased production facilities].” Indeed, while the Uber model has made huge inroads in the taxi and hospitality industries, Parrish says manufacturing has “a higher bar in terms of consistency and traceability of production.” For now, companies using on-demand manufacturing are doing so cautiously—often for small, non-critical parts, with orders in low volumes. Entrepreneurs like Smith and Parrish say the next step is shifting traditional manufacturing toward common standards and more digitization, which will make equipment-sharing easier. But it’s an uphill battle. “It’s always a risk with a new idea,” Sandvik’s Rizzie says. “Convincing a generally conservative population of machining people to move to a new platform and change what they’ve known for the last 50 years—that’s really the risk.” Source: Quartz |
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