Systematic production and process digitization are becoming competitive advantages for businesses such as steel service centers and fabricators. To meet the rapidly changing needs of our customers and the customers they serve, Messer’s mission is evolving from providing solely first-rate machinery to also guiding our customers into their digital transformation with our Intelligent Cutting™ service.

With our Intelligent Cutting™ service, a key part of the Messer Experience, we ensure that every experience is positive and consistent. Together we are your partner in mastering today’s challenges. In that spirit, we provide solutions to businesses and create automation around your production processes. Together, we can build digital strategies to advance your company above your competition, making you competitive now and in the future.

Intelligent Cutting™ can boost your business’s efficiency and productivity, decrease downtimes and errors, and save money.

Digitization not only helps improve your business’s efficiency and raise productivity, but provides products and services with unique selling points for your customers. Also dubbed as Industry 4.0, the digitization revolution has helped companies such as Amazon generate its first $1 billion in revenue in just five years.

Transforming your business to a digital operation can only result in tremendous money and time savings for your business, but improves workflow and creates ease and satisfaction for your team.

In a snapshot, when your business digitizes your production, your team can:

  • Enjoy having access to production information in real-time.
  • Share information with all parties involved in the production.
  • Record all running processes and see their status at a glance.
  • Track your production orders completely and consistently.
  • Test and simulate virtual changes in your production.
  • Implement improvements faster.
  • Discover potential mistakes.
  • Work more efficiently, reduce costs and save resources.

When your business brings aboard Industry 4.0 digitization advancements, your whole value chain can also benefit from:

  • Efficient machine utilization that delivers a greater output.
  • Detecting and reducing money-wasting errors.
  • Minimized and shortened downtimes.
  • Enhanced scalability.
  • Increased freedom to add to new innovative projects.

Let’s explore a number of features that Messer’s Intelligent Cutting™ service can introduce to your business and the many benefits they will provide as part of the Messer Experience.

Paperless production can expedite the production process while providing competitive advantages.

One benefit of Messer’s Intelligent Cutting™ is moving your business to paperless production. In the steel and thermal cutting industry for example, all production information assets and production processes—sales orders, work preparation instructions, production orders and schedules, part unloading information and delivery packaging instructions—can be converted into digital form. This conversion process can lead to virtually paperless production with complete transparency, ensuring everyone involved in the production process has access to real-time information required to execute tasks and provide system feedback.

One benefit of Messer’s Intelligent Cutting™ is moving your business to paperless production. In the steel and thermal cutting industry for example, all production information assets and production processes—sales orders, work preparation instructions, production orders and schedules, part unloading information and delivery packaging instructions—can be converted into digital form.

This conversion process can lead to virtually paperless production with complete transparency, ensuring everyone involved in the production process has access to real-time information required to execute tasks and provide system feedback.

When your business eliminates outdated work instructions, your team can work with greater efficiency, agility and flexibility. Your team can also reduce waste, end “tribal knowledge,” meaning only a select few know assets and processes well, and help your business reap financial rewards that can help increase your competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Connected machines help provide data and eliminate the need for questions about production orders.

Another benefit Messer’s Intelligent Cutting™ service can help your business with is to create an environment of connected machines. When your business’ machines are able to gather and share relevant data as part of an integrated digital environment, your business stands to reap the maximum benefits the entire digitization process can provide.

Digitization at the machine level begins with automatically transmitting the most up-to-date production orders to machines so operators can make decisions while having access to the latest production plan. Your team will no longer be burdened with finding the answers to production order questions such as “Is this part already cut?”, “Is this order already packaged and ready for shipment?” and “What was my machine utilization this shift?” All these questions will be easily answered, thanks to having connected machines in your workplace.

This kind of transparency also provides the data that’s required for your business to achieve continuous production processes and material flow improvements, delivering practically real-time feedback when fine-tuning production processes. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are easily developed and tracked with access to appropriate data.

Finally, connecting machines via Messer’s Intelligent Cutting™ service results in a real-time overview of production, enabling easy comparison of planned vs. actual runtimes. This high level of transparency enables your team to evaluate the true cost per part while ensuring production scheduling reliability. Industry 4.0 production, or digitized production, combined with the latest information and communication technologies guarantees that existing resources will be utilized to their maximum levels. This high-tech production also ensures efficiency in operational management, production planning and control, work preparation, and machine operation. Predictive maintenance helps service and maintenance with their repair needs.

Modular and easily configurable software solutions can provide your business flexibility in growth while maximizing production efficiency.

To support your business along your digitization path, Messer Cutting Systems and MesserSoft also offer machines and software solutions. Our completely modular software portfolio contains modules that can be configured and customized to match your production needs. Our software focuses on ERP integration, CAD/CAM and nesting, work preparation, production planning and scheduling, real-time production data capture, and production job integration on machine’s human-machine interface (HMI).

When combined with Messer’s Intelligent Cutting™ and automation solutions, your business’ production can be operated almost entirely digitally. Some Messer customers report production efficiency increases over 10 percent by using only Machine Insight, our real-time production monitoring, and reporting system, for example. This module improves transparency in the production process while revealing any waste, to help provide continuous improvement for your team.

3D models can create and improve collaborative opportunities with increasingly digital-savvy customers.

Yet another benefit of Messer’s Intelligent Cutting™ service is the business adoption of 3D models. The use of 3D models is helping create collaborative opportunities between steel service centers and their customers. This collaboration can greatly improve and expedite the quotation, order management, and work preparation processes. More and more steel service centers are challenged by their customers to accept 3D models. These models contain data that need to be broken down for quoting, cutting, cleaning, bending, welding, and other processes. Increasingly more customers desire to streamline their processes when outsourcing, seeking suppliers that can accommodate end-to-end digitized cross-company workflows.

Steel service centers and fabricators that can meet these customers’ wishes for this kind of workflow simplicity enjoy a vital competitive advantage over suppliers that have not fully embraced digital technology.

When you choose to partner with Messer, you can be sure your business’s investment in end-to-end 3D integrated solutions will provide your business and customers with the tools needed to collaborate with ease.

OmniFab: Elevate your business’s order management.

All manufacturers want to run a safe and effective operation, but machines present some hurdles to achieving this goal. Traditional equipment prevents consistent, thorough, and simple data tracking. Messer Cutting Systems’ OmniFab is a powerful software suite that can help your business gain insight into costly downtimes on your way to revolutionizing your business through the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Internet of Things has created new automated capabilities for your equipment, helping you run a safer and more effective facility. Your team will have access to innovative data collection and reporting functions to boost transparency and productivity while surpassing common challenges your competitors face such as with data collection, reporting, and implementation.

When your business lacks robust data collection, your team loses insight on material usage and waste, downtime length and type, recurring errors as well as error sources. Moreover, without reliable and consistent reporting data, making sense of information your team has gathered manually can be tedious and very time-consuming. More valuable time is diverted when employees notice issues and order replacement parts or book maintenance appointments. Together, these tasks make for longer downtimes and your team loses the ability to consistently track information and identify problematic patterns quickly.

Messer Cutting Systems’ OmniFab can help improve on all these roadblocks by harnessing the Internet of Things’ latest technology, providing access to capabilities that enable businesses to run their entire operations seamlessly. Imagine having machines that communicate with one another and send relevant information to machine operators and other equipment. Because these machines communicate, data on production times, material usage, machine utilization, production times and downtimes, frequency of errors plus errors responsible for the longest downtimes are gathered and analyzed.

At each stage of a process, data may be tracked and passed along to the next stage and to software that collects and analyzes data. Messer machines have this kind of actionable data, and delivers comprehensive reports to your business’s production-planning team and orders maintenance or replacement parts automatically. Imagine the money and time savings your business would experience with Messer Cutting Systems’ OmniFab in place in your facility.

Available on all of Messer Cutting Systems’ machines with the exception of MetalMaster 3.0, OmniFab can give your business the kind of transparency and traceability that it needs. With our software, your team can easily see the history of an order from quote preparation to post-calculation into a number of machines by integrating functionality and data collection. The software’s functions can help your team create accurate quotes by offering precise data and analytics via robust reports. All data and production results are made available in your CAD/CAM software and ERP system.

Benefits of using OmniFab for job management.

With OmniFab, your team will be able to call up all available jobs with a single click. Your team can easily schedule jobs manually or automatically for the appropriate machines to achieve optimal output. Feedback from running operations comes in real time from the machine operators through OmniFab PDC (Product Data Capture). Your team can use this information to react quickly to changes and make the best decisions.

Here are some other advantages your team will benefit from with OmniFab in use:

  • See a complete overview of all jobs and production orders.
  • Plan jobs intuitively by displaying a planned shift workload.
  • View machine account loading and unloading times.
  • Receive paperless feedback from production.

Contact

Messer Cutting Systems, Inc.


W141 N9427 Fountain Blvd.
Menomonee Falls, WI 53051
USA

 

+1 262-255-5520
+1 262-255-5170
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