umati has new partner FFG

FFG is now part of the umati community.

What expect­a­tions do you have of umati, what do you expect from the partnership?

Par­ti­cip­at­ing in umati ini­ti­at­ive has provided a great oppor­tun­ity for FFG to cre­ate com­pet­it­ive advant­age, con­nect­ing the high-level IT sys­tem in pro­duc­tion envir­on­ments with a stand­ard­ized machine-to-machine con­nec­tion meth­od­o­logy based on the open com­mu­nic­a­tion stand­ard OPC-UA, which is crit­ic­al tech­no­logy to help­ing to bring major advance­ments to the smart fact­ory, enable man­u­fac­tur­ing to be more flex­ible. We are expect­ing the exten­ded sup­port from umati, to define new inform­a­tion mod­els on innov­at­ive applic­a­tions in man­u­fac­tur­ing industry, such as 3D met­al printing.

What advant­ages does umati offer your com­pany and your customers?

The vis­ion of FFG is to lever­age the large poten­tial added value of man­u­fac­tur­ing data, inform­a­tion and know­ledge in a fact­ory-centered way to achieve smart man­u­fac­tur­ing empower­ment, res­ult­ing in high­er integ­ra­tion cap­ab­il­ity and increased fact­ory pro­ductiv­ity. While the primary use of umati is to sim­pli­fy the con­nec­tion between machine tools and extern­al IT sys­tems, the main bene­fit con­sists of mak­ing data pro­cessing easi­er. If data are stand­ard­ized on many machine tool inter­faces, the pro­cessing and ana­lyz­ing of these data will be faster and easier.

How do you eval­u­ate the expan­sion of the Umati ini­ti­at­ive to the entire mech­an­ic­al engin­eer­ing industry?

Nowadays the man­u­fac­tur­ing products in the mar­ket are char­ac­ter­ized by small batches and mul­tiple vari­et­ies, and the innov­at­ive applic­a­tion like 3D met­al print­ing. There­fore, the production-line should recon­fig­ure its pro­cess paths and recom­bine man­u­fac­tur­ing units dynam­ic­ally. Stand­ard­ized, open, flex­ible and secure inter­face can be the ena­bler for a more flex­ible fact­ory envir­on­ment, allows for easi­er recon­fig­ur­a­tion and mov­ing of equip­ment. As a res­ult, the recon­fig­ur­able pro­duc­tion-line can gen­er­ate a large range of dif­fer­ent products due to its vari­ab­il­ity, scalab­il­ity and schedulab­il­ity, which is the basis of flex­ible man­u­fac­tur­ing in smart factory.

About FFG

Fair Friend Group (FFG) was estab­lished in 1979 and strives for excel­lence with the found­ing prin­ciples of reli­ab­il­ity, growth, con­tinu­ous advance­ment, and highest qual­ity stand­ards. FFG has 95 com­pan­ies scattered in 10 major coun­tries. FFG con­sists of three major divi­sions of busi­nesses: (1) Machine Tool Divi­sion, (2) Industry Equip­ment Divi­sion, and (3) Green Energy Division.

The FFG entit­ies in Taiwan unite 6 major brands ( FEELER, LEADWELL, SANCO, ECOCA, EQUIPTOP, TSEMC) from machine tool industry and these brands have sub­stan­tially con­trib­uted to the pro­gress in indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing, which are focus­ing on cus­tom­er needs and apply­ing their spe­cial expert­ise in milling, turn­ing, grind­ing and 3D met­al print­ing manufacturing.