Digital Machine Shop Series: Blog #5 Tool management and set up

Let’s talk about tool management and tool planning on the shop floor.

In tool management, we have two different worlds.  We have the planning side in the CAM room.  In the planning department, we only deal with one tool. But maybe to execute this, we need five of these tools to cut a few hundred holes.  That is what we do here with an integrated tool balancing. What we can do here is look at the job, see what the next tool is, and compare how many tools we need to prepare and assemble, to get ready for this machine.  We can actually go into the controller, look at how many tools are available, what is the remaining cutting time, then we have a “gap list,” this list goes to the pre-setter room for tool preparation to make sure that we get the tools ready when we execute the job in the machine.

We will also look into the tool room. This is very critical to the process.  We want to run the whole set-up on the machine to make sure everything is up and running, accurately prepared, and that we are not missing a tool, and that we are ready to execute the job.  I’ll describe the process in the video, “Digital Machine Shop Series: Tool management and set up.

I provide a complete description of the process in the video: Digital Machine Shop Series: Tool management and set up.

You can view the last Digital Machine Shop Series: Blog: Tool design with new technologies here.

Let me know what you think of the video in the comments section below.

By Armin Gruenewald, Vice President Business Development MBG, Manufacturing Engineering Software, Siemens Digital Factory.