Many SME's face the problem of machine idle time which may or may not be related to breakdown. In fact most of these cases tend to be worker related issues. What they do cause is a slip up in production schedules and monetary losses to the owner. Our client with a rich background in manufacturing technology and a CNC software company themselves chose to address this problem. They knew how to talk to the machine from their CNC expertise and being an SME themselves, they knew that the owner could ill afford to stay in the shop for he needed to service existing customers and find new ones. Another thing that occurred at the time was the mobile boom, now the owner could be remote from the factory and stay in touch with the foreman though the mobile.
Why not combine all the three scenarios was what CADEM thought when they came to us. The solution was to create a device that would sit on an existing machine, record idle times, talk to the machine, find out the cause and send timely reports via mobile to the owner. CADEM mentioned that they needed a box that would look worthy of the machine, seem like an instrument of authority and yet be a black box to the operator who would not know that he was being monitored. We addressed this situation by deciding upon a larger than life approach to the visual scenario by choosing various characters from sci-fi movies as inspiration. One which stood out larger than most was"Magneto" the mutant arch nemesis of humanity. This also tended to make sense to a shop owner as the belt carrying scrap is magnetized to prevent filings falling off. We then helped CADEM design the navigation menus and the layout of command. We also helped ut together a team of vendors that was capable of carrying the piece from concept to production.
