Paperless Parts co-founder and CEO Jason Ray on stage at the company’s POWER users conference, which took place April 30-May 1, 2025, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Photos provided by Paperless Parts. 

The topic of tariffs is bound to come up at any manufacturing event right now, and this is especially true at a gathering of those responsible for quoting and estimating. Paperless Parts’ annual POWER users conference, which took place April 30-May 1, 2025, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, was one such event. 

The conference, now in its third year, provides a way for Paperless Parts to update its users on the latest releases, which are pushed out throughout the year. “We were finding that it was incredibly difficult for us as a team to keep our customers up to speed with what we're doing,” says co-founder and CEO Jason Ray. “We felt like everybody was driving it in first gear. So, we started this user conference to get people to drive the car in fifth gear.”

Between breakout sessions giving users hands-on experience with the platform and keynotes that introduced new features and gave users a sneak peak of Paperless Parts’ roadmap, panel discussions highlighted software features that are helping users address the challenges manufacturers face today. One existing feature spotlighted during a panel discussion called “Navigating Today's Metal Markets” was the platform’s real-time materials pricing. Paperless Parts works with metals suppliers to integrate material prices, so users can have the most up-to-date information for quotes. “We built this feature in response to the metal pricing fluctuations we saw during COVID,” Ray says. “We think this will be really no different.” The company also has plans to enhance this feature to automatically update users that have sent quotes when price or lead times for the quoted material change. “The ability to do that is kind of like a heads-up display in your car. It's right in front of you. It's a lot safer. It's a lot less risk.”

Not only does the event keep users up to date with the software’s latest releases, but it also serves as a way for the company to solicit suggestions for new features.

The conference also provides a valuable opportunity for Paperless Parts to get feedback from its users on features they’d like to see. “Our customers are builders,” he notes. “They like making things. They're constantly thinking, ‘How can we make this better? How can make it stronger?’”

Dropping a BOM Builder

User feedback provided the basis for one of the new features highlighted at POWER 2025 — the BOM Builder. Ray says that, even before tariffs were implemented on imported materials, he saw margins getting thinner for materials suppliers, leading to them offering more value-added services to manufacturers, such as tube laser cutting, waterjet cutting and other forms of preparing blanks. “You're starting to see more and more of the material providers provide the easier processes,” he explains. “If I can take a bar and cut that bar into chunks, instead of you running it on your saw, you should take that.” This frees manufacturers from having to buy and maintain equipment such as saws, EDMs and waterjet cutters which they might not use that often. However, this change is causing manufacturers to shift their capabilities downstream into assembly.

At the same time, Ray sees OEMs trying to consolidate supply chains and asking manufacturers to provide assemblies instead of just components. “When you talk to supply chain managers, the main thing you're hearing is that supply chain complexity leads to a lack of resiliency. So, they want to work with a one-stop shop,” he notes. “They want to be able to go to you, and they want you to be able to produce the entire thing.”

Paperless Parts product manager Meg van Deventer presented on the company’s new BOM Builder feature, which is designed to make building assemblies within the software faster and more efficient.

Paperless Parts users already had the ability to build out bills of material from 3D models, but Ray acknowledges that the process was difficult when working from PDFs. “We sat the team down and said, ‘Go build this bill of materials from this print and count the clicks, understand the problem, and come back and let's talk about it,’” he says. “And everybody came back unanimously and said, ‘We have to fix this.’”

Adding this feature wasn’t easy. “This is probably one of the single biggest investments we've made in our product, because it relied on several different underlying technologies that we needed to build out,” Ray says. The company had to figure out how to enable the software to read prints, identify tables, extract the tables from the prints and then move the data from the tables into other areas of the user interface. It developed optical character recognition (OCR) vision and classification capabilities in house, which kept costs down and enabled the product to maintain FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) compliance. Then the company worked with 25 of its users to develop and fine-tune the BOM Builder before its release in April.

Aided By AI

The BOM Builder uses AI to help extract the tables from prints and spreadsheets. From Ray’s perspective, for now, AI is best used in cases such as this to help inform decisions, not to make decisions. So instant quoting isn’t on the company’s roadmap, but he notes that some customers have successfully built instant quoting on top of Paperless Parts using APIs. “I think it works for a very small subset of work, but I think it creates more risk today than value,” he says.

Paperless Parts has been very selective about where and how it uses AI. Ray wants Paperless Parts users to not only trust that the output of the AI is correct, but also that Paperless Parts is going to be responsible with the data they’re providing. “There’s a lot of trust to be had there,” he says.

So, for now, Paperless Parts is only using AI for tasks that have an objective answer, and there’s plenty of objective answers to be found in quoting. “It's like tapped holes,” Ray says. “How many tapped holes are there on the part? That cannot be a subjective, guessed answer. We've identified these specific features of the part, and that is what is driving the cost. So that's where we're starting with AI. We're not going to do any subjective, derived responses to our customers.”

The next step is to use data to gather insights into jobs. For example, users will be able to see that margins drop when certain industries request certain numbers of parts or certain tolerances. “That's where I would like to go, because that is tribal knowledge that estimators have a gut feel for,” Ray explains. This is the type of information that’s difficult for estimators to pass down because it has historically been difficult to articulate the reasons behind it. “Our goal is to start to derive those same sorts of outputs that are rooted in data, so it’s objective, and then you can trace it. We saw this on a print, and we lost that job, or we didn't make money on that job.”

According to Ray, the BOM Builder represents a significant investment from the company because it required the development of multiple underlying technologies, including the ability to read prints, identify tables and extract them from the prints. This technology serves as the basis for its next technology release, a GD&T call-out extraction feature.

Extracting More Data

The capabilities Paperless Parts developed for the BOM Builder laid the foundation for its next release, a GD&T call-out extraction feature. It started with pulling in part numbers, revisions, descriptions, materials and specifications. “Then we said, ‘Well, what about symbols?’ It turns out that most CAD systems have a couple hundred fonts,” Ray explains.

This poses a difficulty for automated data extraction. Fortunately, Paperless Parts was well-positioned to take on the challenge. “We have samples of drawings from every single CAD system in almost every single font,” Ray notes. Developers used this to build synthetic training data that enabled them to train AI to identify this data accurately.

According to Ray, this data will drive automation in the quoting process. For example, if the drawing calls out brazing or honing, Paperless Parts users can now set up a rule where that quote now automatically adds an operation or kicks off an RFQ to an outside supplier if that process can’t be done in house. If the drawing calls out parallelism, users can set up a rule to automatically change the type of material they need to buy. Or if the datum structures go past E, users can set up a rule to automatically decrease yield by two percentage points. “You can start to build these rules where the user doesn't need to know how to write code in order to configure the system and put their tribal knowledge into Paperless Parts,” he explains.

After a steep drop in April with business activity jolted by on-again, off-again tariff policy, May saw a return to some stability and a Metalworking Index reading of 48.8. The 2.8 points gained weren’t enough to push the index back into expansion, but it indicates metalworking shops have made adjustments and broader activity has picked up again. All components improved in monthly results over April, led by backlogs and new orders. However, the three-month averages reported in our Components Scorecard are weighed down by April, revealing supplier deliveries and employment as resilient indicators on the rise. The Future Business Index remains optimistic as stronger May results help smooth out recently waning outlooks for the next 12 months.

The GBI Components Scorecard reports the monthly change rate of primary metalworking market factors contributing to the overall monthly index reading.  

Reading the Scorecard:

• Color indicates where a component value falls relative to 50 for the current month. Green indicates expansion, and red indicates contraction.
• Shade indicates a value’s distance from 50. The darker the shade, the further from 50.
• Direction indicates a value’s change versus the previous period. Pointing up is always better.

The GBI Future Business Index is an indicator of the future state of the metalworking market from industry respondents regarding their opinion of future business conditions for the next 12 months. Over 50 is expansion and under 50 is contraction.

Three-month average for the Future Business Index, 58.5, remains positive overall despite a drop from highs at the start of the year.

Find the latest metalworking market research and reporting at .

Despite the significant advances in modeling machining operations over the past decades, process damping remains a topic of interest, including new tool designs that increase the effect. The stability map displayed in Figure 1 offers an effective predictive capability for selecting stable spindle speed-axial depth combinations in milling. However, the increase in allowable axial depth at higher spindle speeds is diminished at lower spindle speeds. Fortunately, the process damping effect can serve to increase the stable axial depth at these low speeds. The increased stability at low spindle speeds is particularly important for hard-to-machine materials that exhibit prohibitive tool wear at high cutting speeds.

Prior studies have described process damping as energy dissipation due to interference between the cutting tool flank face and the machined surface during relative vibrations between the tool and workpiece. It has been shown that, given fixed system dynamics, the influence of process damping increases at low spindle speeds because the number of undulations on the machined surface between teeth increases, which also increases the slope of the wavy surface. This, in turn, leads to increased interference and additional energy dissipation.

To describe the physical mechanism for process damping, consider a tool moving on a sine wave while shearing away the chip as shown in Figure 2. Four locations are identified: 1) the clearance angle, g, between the flank face of the tool and the work surface tangent is equal to the nominal relief angle for the tool; 2) g is significantly decreased and can become negative (which leads to interference between the tool’s flank face and surface); 3) g is again equal to the nominal relief angle; and 4) g is significantly larger than the nominal value.

At points 1 and 3 in Figure 2, the clearance angle is equal to the nominal value so there is no effect due to cutting on the sinusoidal path. However, at point 2 the clearance angle is small (or negative) and the thrust force in the surface normal direction, n, is increased. At point 4, on the other hand, the clearance angle is larger than the nominal and the thrust force is decreased. Because the change in force caused by the sinusoidal path is 90 degrees (that is, a quarter wave) out of phase with the displacement and has the opposite sign from velocity, it is considered to be a viscous damping force (or a force that is proportional to velocity). Given this description, the process damping force in the surface normal direction can be expressed as a function of velocity, axial depth and spindle speed (or cutting speed). This process damping force model can be included in milling simulations to predict the process damping zone as shown in Figure 1.

(formerly known as EASTEC) saw many companies showcasing machines, tooling, software and more that can meet the needs of broad audiences as well as very specific needs. While it’s impossible to spotlight everything on display at the show, what follows are some examples related to process consolidation, custom offerings and AI.

Grob’s latest generation of its G550T mill-turn can perform gear skiving and fir tree-milling in addition to more expected mill-turn functions like standard milling and turning. Fir tree milling to produce parts like the one pictured has exacting machine requirements, with the large contact area on hard material requiring a very stable, rigid machine while both part and spindle spin.

Process Consolidation

Process consolidation showings at the show came in the form of multi-process machines as well as more unexpected forms, with highly versatile software, capability-increasing refinements to existing technology and technology to facilitate automated multi-process work.

Grob’s G550T mill-turn acted as the company’s centerpiece at the show. While the G550T mill-turn has been a part of Grob’s lineup since 2010, it has been updated over the course of several generations. In addition to traditional milling and turning, the G550T can also perform gear skiving and fir tree milling. The table can also rotate to machine the part upside down, improving reach and chip clearance to enable users to perform more operations and part programs on a single machine.

From a different perspective, Erowa has seen interest in its products grow because of their compatibility with mill-turn and multi-process machines, including B-axis lathes. The company offers workholding, automation, and support software that simplify complex manufacturing processes. In automation, Erowa has particularly targeted parts with long cycle times. It also extends automation not just to parts, but to pallets, enabling overnight automation, even with multiple jobs. Company spokespeople say this strategy is compatible not just with milling, but also with EDM work.

Rather than target its fixturing and automation tooling for individual parts, Erowa focuses on whole-pallet automation, which more easily enables automating multiple jobs to run lights-out.

Speaking of EDM work, advancements in EDM technology have led GF Machine’s staff at the show to suggest that EDMs could be used to perform work that once would have required a mill. The software onboard the company’s Cut F 600 automatically senses where to slow down and speed up based on part thickness, a function which protects against wire breaks, and technology that enables the wire to spark only at the bottom (rather than the bottom and the sides) improves precision. While company spokespeople say EDM work has long been a tool and die specialty, these advancements make it more viable as a substitute for end mills when creating certain parts. The EDM process generates less heat and deflection than traditional milling, GF’s staff say, enabling it to hold tight tolerances with relative ease.

TopSolid, meanwhile, has built on its original CAD/CAM software to consolidate many shop management processes into a single ecosystem. The company’s software can work as its original CAD/CAM software, as well as ERP software, robotic programming software and machine monitoring software. This common system can take in the data from these separate functions and use it to inform future work — for example, it can tell which machines are using which tools in real time, and if jobs being programmed require that tool, the software can warn users about capacity issues or tool wear issues.

By combining three drills for different operations into one, ARCH Cutting Tools has consolidated one customer’s tooling while eliminating the need to manipulate standard tools to perform some of these operations. Custom tooling is a key part of ARCH’s business, making up 75% of its tooling.

Custom Work

Multiple companies at the show emphasized custom solutions, both in tooling and beyond. ARCH Cutting Tools has found its niche in creating custom tooling for specific purposes and customers. One tool the company showcased at the event combined three drills into one, enabling the client to complete multiple drilling operations with a single tool, without the need to manipulate a standard tool in ways that required experience machinists. Fives’ CITCO tooling division performs custom edge prep to modify its tooling from ISO standards, and does a steady business designing and manufacturing custom PCD, CBN and diamond cutting tools for customers. Ceratizit has a full team working with customers on custom, 3D-printed tooling, with the lessons learned there also improving its growing catalog of standard 3D-printed tooling. Beyond its growing line of standard ceramic tooling, Greenleaf has also seen growth in the market for custom tooling designed for specific customer projects.

Tooling management software company Omega TMM says its claim to fame is its customizability. Shop floor and tool cabinet layouts within the software are user-customizable, and the software can integrate with CRM and CAM software, feeding data back and forth. Eastern US and Canada Sales Manager Nicholas Wiktorski says this helps users track their tooling stock and ensure they have enough of the correct tooling to perform their scheduled jobs.

Blue Photon’s chemical workholding works well with complex shapes, such as those produced through additive manufacturing. It also does not require a dovetail, helping simplify five-axis processes.

Blue Photon, meanwhile, has been able to expand its workholding business by working with partners to produce custom fixtures. In these situations, the partner companies produce the bottom half of the vise, while Blue Photon produces the chemical workholding grippers on the upper side. These grippers, which use an adhesive that activates with the application of UV light, can hold parts securely in a free state and eliminate the need for dovetail removal. Company spokespeople say this makes Blue Photon a good candidate for holding additive and five-axis parts. The company has also improved its familiarity with additive manufacturing to make more efficient support structures for the grippers while enabling the company’s equipment to conform to complex geometries.

MachineMetrics is also continuing its push into broader capabilities and MES territory through a custom applications builder and configurable dashboards, both powered by shop-side AI. Chief Commercial Officer Graham Immerman says that this functionality will enable shops to build custom programs quickly, even if they have no experience coding. The company has also been working to fully integrate with more ERP systems out of the box, providing an additional data source for the MachineMetrics software and expanding its functionality.

Among updates to MT-Linki and its robots, FANUC displayed a Levil Technology desktop mill equipped with one of its controls. While desktop milling is most popular in education applications, Debra Schug says that it has seen some use in space-starved companies. Industrial Partnership Account Manager Jeff Orleman at Rego-Fix also noticed the relative growth in the desktop milling market and says that his company has started making desktop mill toolholders as a result.

The AI of It All

AI has also been at the heart of advancements championed by other software companies at MT Technology Series East. ECI showcased its JobBoss² and M1 manufacturing ERP software program, JobBoss² for job shops with custom work and M1 for shops with more regular work and higher warehouse demands. JobBoss², with its functionality for the quick creation of parts and job entries, particularly benefits from ECI’s adoption of AI BOM Builder. This feature takes imported CSV and PDF files and extrapolates a bill of materials from features listed in the file. Engineers from the company say that this reduces the time to create these bills from minutes to seconds, with the time savings only improving as revisions require new bills of materials.

Many companies at MT Technology Series East promoted their ties to and success in the aerospace industry, mentioning that it appeared to be growing once again. Several companies also focused their offerings at the show on this audience, including Sumitomo, which showcased its binderless CBN tooling alongside a special grade of carbide tooling meant for titanium alloys.

Harmoni now features automated reports, with its own AI tool (facetiously called HAL, or “Harmoni AI Lieutenant”) undergoing testing and optimization. President David Caputo says that HAL will not only report on data and trends, but provide potential rationales behind the data, with it acting as a “shop floor manager, but Harmoni.”

The Robotics Summit and Expo took place April 30-May 1 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, bringing together developers working on robots in industries from manufacturing and logistics to healthcare, agriculture and more.

The robotics industry is fragmented. Robots exist for a wide range of industries, from manufacturing to healthcare to agriculture and beyond. Robots for each of these industries share common technologies, but they’re put together and deployed differently based on that industry’s specific needs. But this won’t always be the case — robot makers are working toward a general-purpose robot platform that could work across all industries: a humanoid robot.

Humanoid robots were a hot topic at the , an event for robot developers held April 30-May 1 in Boston, Massachusetts. Humanoids were everywhere, from the show floor, where a teleoperated G1 humanoid robot from was interacting with attendees, to the presentations, which focused on both the big-picture and technical details of humanoids.  

Aaron Saunders, CTO of robot maker , summed up the current state of humanoid robotics in his keynote address on the first day of the event, “The Promise of Humanoid Robots — Research Vs. The Real World.” In it, he laid out the current barriers robot developers currently face in their quest to create a form of general-purpose automation that can be deployed quickly.

1. Body Control. The first challenge in humanoid robot development is body control. According to Saunders, the Boston Dynamics team is developing body control through whole-body humanoid reinforcement learning, which involves a human simulating movements that a humanoid robot then copies. Saunders showed a video of a person breakdancing in a motion-capture suit, followed by footage of Atlas, Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, performing the same movements. He reported that most of the motion translated over directly, with no manual editing required. Body control also goes beyond enabling movement — it’s also a safety issue, as Nikolai Ensslen, CEO of motion control company pointed out during his presentation, “Making Autonomous Bipedals Stable and Safe: Tackling the Safety and Real-World Interfacing Challenges of Physical AI.” In most robotics, a stopped robot is a safe robot. But this doesn’t necessarily apply to humanoids, which are at risk of falling over when they stop. Sensors and software provide sufficient safety for traditional robot arms, but he noted that cameras and AI are needed for safe functioning of autonomous humanoids.

2. Understanding Surroundings. Saunders said that visual foundation models (VFMs) can be used to give robots additional context on their environment. For example, Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot uses height to determine whether it should step over an obstacle or go around it. But VFMs give additional context on obstacles it would step over based only on height, but could still cause problems (wires, carts with wheels, grates).

3. Object Manipulation. Boston Dynamics is advancing dexterous grasping capabilities via reinforcement training aided by Robotics' DextrAH-RGB workflow, as Saunders showed in another video. Meanwhile, on the show floor, was showcasing its touch-sensing bionic Ability Hand, which can be used as a prosthetic or for robots. The demonstration enabled a user to control the Ability Hand via a camera.

Saunders noted that these are software barriers, as most of the hardware barriers have already been overcome. Specifically, the primary challenge is that the highest quality of data needed to overcome these barriers is difficult to gather and therefore rare (for example, data collected from teleoperating robots), while the most common data is comparatively less helpful (text, images and video from the Internet).

Humanoids in Manufacturing and Beyond

Manufacturing was another theme at the event. I heard more than once that the manufacturing industry, with its ongoing skilled labor shortage, presents the biggest opportunity for the robotics industry. And it’s not just the robot developers that have their eye on the manufacturing industry — the manufacturing industry is taking note of humanoid robots as well. Several large manufacturers have taken a stake in developing humanoid robots, including Hyundai Motor Company (which has an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics), Mercedez-Benz (which has a stake in ) and Tesla (which is working on its own humanoid robot). Once these robots exist in a form that can work on a factory floor, the industry will have to solve the challenge of industry adoption.

But a general-purpose humanoid robot won’t stop at manufacturing. In his presentation, Saunders noted that while today’s robots are industrial, meaning built for a specific purpose, Boston Dynamics’ ultimate goal is to develop multi-purpose service robots and, eventually, general robots for the home.

The NZ Tre is a three-turret, twin-spindle lathe. At its 2025 Innovation Days, DMG MORI showed off a model where all three turrets had B-axis capability, giving the machine increased flexibility for working at angles or performing milling operations. Image courtesy of DMG MORI.

One Machine, Many Operations

Masahiko Mori, president of DMG MORI, estimates that there are approximately 5,000,000 machines currently in use worldwide, with many old and needing updating or replacing. He estimates that this plethora of machines (and the setups they require) can cause quality issues, with process consolidation providing an answer to this problem.

As such, many of the machines DMG MORI develops and offers can perform multiple tasks that historically would have required additional machines. The second generation NLX 2500 is on the simpler side of these examples, with the new model of the lathe swapping out a subspindle for a second full spindle to perform the work of two lathes on one. The NZ Tre at the event took this even further, as each of its three turrets operated on a B-axis, enabling it to work on an angle, with live tooling for milling operations. The machine also comes standard with two full-powered spindles that can both handle high-RPM work. Ideally, a bar feeder can feed a part to the first spindle to turn the front half of the part, then the second, equally powerful spindle can accept the part and enable the operator to turn the back half of the part in a single setup.

DMG MORI’s large-format DuoBlock U-series brings this flexibility to a dual-column five-axis mill with its B-axis head and C-axis table. The DuoBlock U-series is built to be rigid enough for aerospace and gear parts, and offers both large-volume milling and turning — as its head and spindle can rotate from vertical to horizontal positions. DMG MORI’s INH 63 offers a combination of the DuoBlock and the company’s NHX horizontal mill, being a large horizontal five-axis mill that can perform milling and turning. The INH 63 can also perform skiving, deep boring and deep drilling, which the company says makes it a good fit for aerospace and gear manufacturing.

Several machines on display at DMG MORI’s Innovation Days were equipped with DMG MORI’s refreshed CELOS X control. This control restores physical buttons to the control while providing users with options to view NC programming areas and CELOS apps on the upper screen. Photo by DMG MORI.

The Information You Need, When You Need It

These newer machines use DMG MORI’s recently updated CELOS X control. Perhaps the most eye-catching aspect of this new control is the way it contextually edits which functions appear on the physical buttons (which are equipped with digital screens) in real time, eliminating irrelevant controls and helping users focus on the needs of their current operation.

CELOS X continues the CELOS line as an interface overlaying a more traditional NC from another provider such as Heidenhain, Mitsubishi or Siemens. Whereas the CELOS V from the first generation NLX 2500 on display at the facility used dual screens, with the NC and CELOS apps on separate screens, CELOS X enables users to set up views in different boxes on one screen. It also restores the aforementioned physical buttons to the control, which several DMG MORI staff members told me they were thankful for — the physical feedback from the buttons being helpful when looking at the screen or the machine itself.

DMG MORI also offered demonstrations of DMG MORI Messenger, an in-house machine monitoring software with custom dashboards and a focused set of features, helping users find relevant data about machine conditions and alarms without needing to dig for them. The software also interfaces with NetService, a DMG MORI remote diagnostic service that enables users to give DMG MORI representatives access to the control for troubleshooting.

Also on display was Tulip, a no-code application builder from a partner company. DMG MORI hopes that this software will help shops develop their own specialized software applications, but also provides some pre-built apps. DMG MORI’s team also demonstrated Condition Agent, an AI-powered predictive maintenance system the company hopes to launch by the end of 2025. Formerly known as Walc Care, Condition Agent compares how a machine ran compared to previous cycles, tracking when performance begins to show the same patterns that have led it to errors in the past.

Condition Agent is the first of many AI-powered software platforms Dr. Mori hopes to shepherd to common usage. He notes that the company has over 10,000 machines connected to monitoring, which has helped build Condition Agent. He also notes that it could be an effective aid for inspection and the development of additive parameters.

Condition Agent is an upcoming AI-powered predictive maintenance software based on data from a user’s own machine. DMG MORI staff say the system will be compatible with Siemens and FANUC controls, regardless of machine manufacturer. Photo by 91±¬ÁÏÍø.

A Usable Transformation

DMG MORI has also invested in automation and supplemental technology to simplify operators’ jobs. Gantry and articulated robots were both common sights on the showroom floor at Innovation Days, as well as pallet systems.

The company also showcased its ZeroFog and ZeroSludge systems at the event. Both systems are technically optional on DMG MORI’s machines, but the applications experts I spoke with at the event say that they are highly recommended. The former is a mist collector that uses suction from fans to remove fine particles from the air, improving air quality in the shop and reducing the risk of condensation around machine tools. The ZeroSludge Coolant Pro is a two-chamber system that channels coolant upward from one chamber to the other, leaving oil and other unwanted sludge in the sump. One applications expert I spoke with says that this device helps ensure the stability of high-pressure operations, especially drilling, by preventing coolant channels from clogging and malfunctioning.

Ultimately, these technologies help increase uptime and streamline the operation of complex machines. They help promote the adoption of these machines, which Mori suggests will be able to take the place of multiple machines on the shop floor. In fact, he predicts that process consolidation will lead the number of total machine tools on the market worldwide to contract from 5,000,000 machines to 1,000,000 — but with the same or better levels of productivity and quality on account of their efficiency.

Transcript

Julia Hider: Autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs and automated guided vehicles or AGVs have many potential uses in a machine shop. From tending machine tools to delivering new cutting tools, to moving away full chip bins. Autonomous robots’ ability to move around a facility means they can handle more machines than traditional fixed robots and take up less space.

Medical manufacturer RMS dreamed of finding a fully integrated, autonomous machine tending robot for years. It finally found a solution in the HelMo system from Staubli.

HelMo consists of an industrial robotic arm mounted on top of an AGV base. It follows a pre-programed path around its cell, using three area scanners to detect any obstacles and stop it if necessary. The scanners can also slow or stop the speed of the robotic arm if it detects people nearby.

RMS uses the HelMo to tend Robodrills that machine high volume medical parts. The Helmo can tend as many as eight machines. And during manned shifts, two operators for every four machine tools flip parts from the first operation to the second operation. It also runs lights out between second and first shifts, giving the shop three more hours of unattended machining time.

According to RMS, the HelMo is cheaper than having a plug and play automation system at every machine tool. It also saves space, a key consideration for a shop with 850 machine tools and more on order.

But as RMS has learned, the benefits come with trade offs. Its flexibility meant that RMS had to solve problems as they arose in order to get the system working perfectly.

Each machine that the HelMo tends has these three studs. When the robot comes up to the machine, it scans them. And that helps the robot orient itself so it knows where it is in space, so it can begin loading and unloading. But these studs are strategically located on the machine so it can be serviced without removing them, because if the studs are removed and they aren't put back in the exact same place, that causes problems with orientation.

The team also redesigned the locating stud on its fixtures, so that these flats are always in the same position because that's what the robot grabs onto when it moves the fixtures.

The HelMo has three sensors, two on the back and one on the front. And the RMS team eventually realized that these sensors can pick up oil mist from the machines and that was affecting the navigation. So they've since had to install more mist collectors to help mitigate that issue.

One of the simplest issues they had to troubleshoot was these air hoses. People will leave them all over, on and around the machine tool, but that would cause problems with the robot's navigation. So now everybody hangs up the air hoses on a hook.

Trade school classmates Tobias Flood and Mark Eiden started Metal Trade Solutions in 2017 with a CNC plasma cutter, some welding equipment and a manual lathe. The company has since added two CNC milling machines from DN Solutions and moved into prototyping and low-volume production work. Photos provided by Metal Trade Solutions. 

Learning the Metal Trade

Tobias Flood and Mark Eiden met in 2013 while studying machine tool technology. The two shared a goal of starting a business, so when they completed the machine tool technology program, they each took a third year of business-focused classes. During this time, they began renovating the building that now houses MTS. In 2017, they officially launched the company, working part-time and focusing on fabrication work due to its lower overhead costs as compared to machining. “We started with a CNC plasma cutter, a couple welders and a Bridgeport manual lathe. We hit the ground running with those,” Flood says. Eventually they added a used CNC mill. “Half the time was spent fixing the machine and half the time was spent making parts on it,” he jokes.

In late 2019, Flood and Eiden dedicated themselves to MTS full-time and began considering new machine tools. “We signed a purchase agreement on a Friday for a brand-new DN Solutions machine,” Flood recounts. “And then the whole world shut down by Monday because of COVID.” At that point, MTS provided engineering services for medical device tooling and assembly work, but with the additional machining capacity, it has moved into prototyping and other low-volume work.

Standardization provides a foundation for MTS’s growth. The shop’s first area of standardization was its tooling, which it manages by limiting its tooling and keeping an updated tool library in Fusion360.

Tools

“I think the foundation to all of the standardization across our shop started with tools,” Flood says. It started as an extension of the lean principle of reducing wasted motion. If programmers are trying to program a part and don’t know what tools the shop has available, they have to get up, walk over to the tool cabinet and physically check their options. To reduce programming time, Flood decided to take advantage of the tool library in the company’s CAM system, Autodesk Fusion360. He had the shop’s only machinist manually add every tool in the shop to Fusion360, a process that took two weeks. “He hated it. I hated making him do it,” he says. “And then at the end he goes, ‘Holy cow, this is going to work so good.’” Limiting the tools in the library to a standard set further speeds the process by reducing the number of available tools a programmer has to choose from.

MTS ensures all new technology is fully implemented into the business. MTS has committed to using these Kurt vises as its standard workholding, which makes setup and quoting much easier.

Workholding

After MTS purchased its second DN Solutions milling machine (a slightly smaller version of the first machine, but still very similar for standardization purposes), the shop didn’t budget for tooling and workholding. So, Flood bought a random assortment of vises at an auction. “It was dreadful, horrible, horrible, horrible,” he says. “If you wanted to set up a 40-inch-long part in the machine that's 40 inches long, you'd have to set up four random vises and then indicate all the backs just to get your part in there. That would take probably two hours.” The situation was untenable and needed to change. “I went back to the bank and said, ‘I need another loan to buy tooling for the machines you financed the past two years,’” he recounts.

Some of the money from that loan went to six Kurt vises. It wasn’t a small investment, but Flood says it was worth it. “I calculated the ROI, and this is the best $16,000 I could ever spend,” he notes. “Now, I'm so allergic to those old hodgepodge vises. I'm like, ‘Just get them out of here. I don't want to see them.’” 

Even with standardization, the allure of new technology can be strong. Flood describes a different workholding system he purchased in the hopes of making the shop more efficient. “I bought that system and bolted it down to my machine. But then on Monday, I’d need that system and then on Tuesday I’d need a vise,” he explains. “I'm still flip-flopping stuff back and forth all day, every day.” MTS didn’t see the efficiency it could have seen from that system because it didn't commit to putting it in the machine and leaving it there. Since this incident, Flood is wary of “half-adopted technology.” Now, when MTS chooses a standard technology, it fully commits.

Standardizing its workholding with the Kurt vises has not only streamlined the production process, but the quoting process as well. Flood showed me the worksheet he uses to quote new parts and points out a field for how long the job will take to set up. “I almost don't even use it anymore because I know that machine can be set up in six minutes,” he says. “My customer isn’t paying for setup time. They just want parts.”

In 2021, MTS started tracking its work using kanban cards before migrating to Excel and eventually a custom ERP system.

ERP

MTS also had to standardize its ERP system to keep the business running smoothly. Setting up processes that are standardized to gather and keep track of necessary data consistently in a growing company has not been easy, especially given that MTS has not been using a traditional ERP system.

In 2021, MTS started using kanban cards to track workflows. The shop quickly transitioned this information into Excel, where it soon found inefficiencies. “Only one person can have it open at a time, and then you step on each other's feet,” Flood remembers. “We were running around saying, ‘Can you close this document? I need to add something to it.’” These issues compounded as the company grew and added its first full-time machinist. As more data was added, the Excel document became larger and more unwieldy. Eventually, the file became too difficult to manage, even with paper travelers.

Flood realized the company needed a database that could point to other databases, but he didn’t have the resources to build a SQL/relational database from scratch. Instead, he partnered with another company that had already built a custom ERP system, using it as a base for his own. While Flood worked on figuring out the more complex aspects of his new custom system, he started with a simple application: a time clock. “We bought an iPad, put it by the front door, downloaded the software and made a simple form,” he says. “You can view that information, put in the pay periods and calculate everything. Accounting could just look at the dashboard and everybody's hours are already right there.” He estimates this eliminated an hour of work from every pay period. As Flood learned more about the software, he continued to move data over. By the end of 2022, MTS had migrated everything, including new orders, its customer list, supplier list, tooling list and more from Excel to its custom system.

As the business grew, the burden of building and populating the custom ERP became too much. Flood estimates it takes two hours to build a form such as this one for adding new end mills to the company’s tooling library, and it doesn’t even cover all of MTS’s tools. The company recently invested in ProShop to alleviate this burden.

But Flood says creating the framework of the ERP from scratch and populating it with existing information was a lot of work. For example, he showed me the form he built to add a new end mill to the carbide tool list. It includes fields for product manufacturer (with a dropdown list of carbide tool suppliers), product ID, electronic data processing (EDP) number, end mill subtype, whether it’s standard/metric or ferrous/nonferrous, diameter, coating, flute count, length of cut, overall length, chipbreakers and reduced neck, as well as space for a link to the product’s web page. “I have put in a ton of work to make sure A, this is easy to do and B, you can't mess it up, so that you get consistency between each person,” he explains. “That is such a thoughtful and detailed process. It's super difficult to get right.”

And that carbide form doesn’t even handle all of the shop’s tooling. “Every time you get a new tool type, you'd have to add a new form because that type of tool has different information,” Flood notes. For example, he says the software doesn’t yet have a section for dovetail cutters. “If I wanted to, I’d go in there and add a new table with stuff specific to dovetails, then I'd have to make a form for the dovetails,” he says. “Then I would have to make an automation to connect this way back over to the master list to draw its number. Let's call that a two-hour task, which I've done several times. But it's that two-hour task to get the functionality we want or need.”

Eventually, Flood realized he was spending so much time building out functionality for his ERP system, when an off-the-shelf ERP system for manufacturing would have everything MTS needs already. The shop recently invested in ProShop and is working on implementation.

Flood says the transition from the flexibility of his custom ERP to an off-the-shelf system might require changes in other areas of the business. “You can see the workflow that they want you to use very clearly and it's a little bit different in my business,” he says. “I have to take a step back ... and say, “That was our workflow. We have to change that workflow just a little bit.’ And figure out how my organization is going to maximize that.”

Despite this, MTS is going all-in on the new ERP. “I'm committed to it,” Flood says. “I hired a new employee to handle the ProShop implementation.” And at the end of the day, he says ProShop is the best fit for his vision of the future of MTS. “I think once it's implemented, I'm going to go, ‘This is the best decision ever,’ because we're maximized for making money 18 months from now, or three years from now.”

With Okuma Connect Plan, the answer is yes. And it’s easy. Connect Plan collects machine tool data and presents detailed machine operational information to operators, shopfloor leads, managers and owners in a simplified, engaging format. It’s an IIoT software that helps you measure, monitor and manage the performance of and returns on your machine tools in three simple steps.

Connect

Easily install Okuma Connect Plan software to enable data collection on the machine tool. If you operate an Okuma machine, connect the OSP control to a server and install the Factory Monitor suite. From there, follow the prompts to enable Connect Plan. Accommodations can be made for non-Okuma controls, allowing shops with any machine or CNC control from other builders to benefit from this solution. 

Connect Plan on a mobile device. Source: Okuma

Visualize

Once machines are online, Connect Plan presents data — machine status, maintenance status, part program histories, command histories and alarm histories  — via easy-to-read graphs and images in a standard web browser. Statuses are accessible from the shop floor, an office, a smart device or virtually anywhere. Remote monitoring enables early anomaly detection in real time, which improves process efficiencies. If you view histories and reports from a factory level (as opposed to the individual machine level), Connect Plan shows utilization and statuses in real time with color indicators:

•    Green means the machine is running within normal limits
•    Yellow denotes an idle machine
•    Red indicates a down machine.

Improve

Visualization prompts action. When you see historical operational results, current machine stoppages and machining reports, causes of downtime or idling can be pinpointed and analyzed. Then, improvements can be made. Machines can be strategically scheduled to take on more work, which maximizes spindle utilization and potential profitability. Decisions regarding operations are also more informed. And because maintenance times can also be visualized with various icons, you can become more diligent with forecasting and scheduling preventive machine tool maintenance, too.

Connectivity Creates Consistency and Capacity on Every Shop Floor

Connect your machine tools with Okuma Connect Plan and open possibilities for machine utilization, decision making and shopfloor connectivity. To preview the features and benefits of Okuma Connect Plan, Connect Plan Lite is available for download today.