Differentiators among machine tool makers are many. A long corporate history, using the best steel, responsive support, being the first in a market, price—all of these things have been used as differentiators and probably will for some time. But days are coming where one of the most important differentiators is software.
Making a part out of a piece of metal is a complex business, and no one piece of software can do the job; it would be asking too much. The interface would be practically unlearnable too. And so, software naturally has broken up into job-specific constituent parts (controls on a machine, inventory, shipping, CAD, accounting, management info, etc.); the way to digitize a business is to divide and conquer. While we say we want our software to do it all, we are not saying that we want one package to do it all—we just want to access information from all of these modules or individual applications if and when it’s necessary to do so.
Machine manufacturers are very clever. At their simplest, machines like a press brake and a stamping press essentially push metal into dies to reshape it with weight and pressure. The differentiators include how well you can control the pressing or bending (many products employ servo motors for detailed control), time savings during use (fast travel until you get near the piece, at which time the mechanism slows down), and automating certain activities like tool changing, for example. Take a simple machine and differentiate it with newer hardware (the servo motor, the speed change on the motor, the tool changing system). You’ll need software to run the hardware, though.
While the items I mentioned still differentiate, software will be the dominant differentiator in 10 years. Why? Well, for one thing, it makes economic sense to bring out new features that are software-based. Maybe a panel bender can’t tie a fishing fly, but with the proper software control you can get all the accuracy and nuance you could ever need while bending metal. And, if new opportunities crop up because of those nuances, a vendor can change the software to accommodate the new opportunities rather than bringing out new hardware all the time.
Hardware revisions just can’t do the job in today’s increasingly dynamic environment. Software revisions and new functionality take weeks or even days; new hardware-based revisions just can’t be done in days. We have been conditioned to expect major product revisions annually or thereabouts. But when the new capabilities are software driven, that annual time slice drops to a quarterly schedule or even less. Buyers of machine tools will be asked to make major decisions more frequently too.
Where software inroads lie
As briefly as possible, let’s look at a few aspects of software and where it will change the business of fabricators, machine shops, and lots of manufacturers of many stripes.
Human Machine Interface (HMI): This is a key area because what the machines do is specific but complex. Any time you use a software system, you have two overlapping circles, the left circle is the “system” and the right side is the “environment,” and the middle eye-shaped area is the “interface,” or the place where machine meets the real world (as defined by software consultant Robert Elder at www.robertelder.org). Keyboard, mouse, physical dial/switch, and touchscreen methods have lately been joined by augmented reality (AR) systems. The best products will come from companies who work well on the implementation (which Elder defines as everything in the software system that is not the interface) and the specific universe of interest (SUI, my contribution to Elder’s model, which is everything in the specific real-world environment germane to the task, and not a part of the interface).
Universal access: One of the interesting things about software management of a shop is that you can have remote access to live information. Many software packages offer this, often via a remote user with a tablet. If the fabricator has an excellent relationship with their machine vendor and high trust, they may opt for a service like allowing the vendor to manage the machines for them, for a fee. While some will balk at the prospect, others will see value in giving the job of 24 x 7 machine optimization and its concomitant responsibility to the vendor. Security, of course, becomes paramount in such a situation.
A digital fabric. This won’t happen tomorrow, but I believe the factory floor of tomorrow will by necessity and even convenience become digital. Thinking today’s environment already is a digital fabric isn’t quite right. IIoT and other movements have given us connectivity but not interoperability and definitely not a digital fabric. What is a digital fabric? Well, it requires connectivity, and will evolve into interoperability (which will be slow because of the attractiveness of a closed system). Then we will have the digital fabric, wherein even the hardware was designed from the ground up as digital. Movements will be highly granular and well-defined, as opposed to an analog system that takes a bit of “getting it right” before production can begin. The digital fabric will really show its value in management and moves adds, and changes. New products will be immediately part of the digital fabric when installed.
There will be more changes due to software as we move toward the Fifth Wave, and software will set the table for newer services like machine leasing (remotely updated, serviced on a schedule), and ratings of machines, groups of machines, and processes (we’ll be able to automatically track things like total cost of ownership making three separate parts vs. one complex part, factoring in green light time, for example).
It’s going to be a fun ride.