The Grinding Symposium 2019 hosted by the United Grinding Group attracted hundreds of journalists, customers, and other stakeholders from around the world. Held near its Studer subsidiary’s plant in Thun, Switzerland, the scenery of the Alps and a warm welcome was combined with a purpose: education.
Speeding the flow of jobs through the shop, while maintaining top quality, ranks among the hallmarks of any successful manufacturing operation’s goals.
Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, a business unit of Hexagon AB, outlined its vision for the future of manufacturing at HxGN Live, the company’s annual digital solutions conference, held June 11-15 in Las Vegas.
With the Steel Topping Out event, ZEISS has completed the steel portion of its state-of-the-art site near Detroit. The new facility for the Industrial Quality and Research (IQR) segment of ZEISS, represented in the USA by Carl Zeiss Industrial Metrology, LLC, is scheduled to be complete in June 2020 and will consolidate four existing Michigan facilities into one location.
I’m always amazed by the wide range of technologies that go into the process of machining. At EASTEC 2019, I saw the latest and greatest technology from machine tool builders, cutting tool manufacturers, measurement providers, software developers, and many more.
Maybe your company specializes in aerospace or medical components, and you need to produce complex geometries in metals too tough to cut via conventional machining methods.
There’s nothing mysterious about the need for calibration. As Michael Wilm, business manager for calibration products, Renishaw Inc., West Dundee, Illinois, put it: “When you get gas for your car, you count on the pump being calibrated. That’s why we calibrate machine tools. If you don’t calibrate a machine tool you have no idea it’s going to give you reliable service for manufacturing your product.”
More and more manufacturers are seeing productivity as a crucial factor to their business success. In the meantime, business models are changing from the large quantities and few variants to small quantities with frequently changed variants. This change requires high flexibility during production.
Purchasing and supply executives expect manufacturing to continue expanding in 2019, according to a survey by the Institute for Supply Management.
Simulation in manufacturing is becoming much more pervasive. Advanced visualizations are used everywhere, from machining on shop-floor CNCs to offline CAD/CAM programming of NC equipment.