After growing the Fabrication Studio space last year to accommodate our custom control panel build shop and add significant capacity for contract manufacturing capabilities, we are expanding it again to double in size. These expansions reflect DMC’s growth in manufacturing operations complementing our manufacturing automation, test and measurement, and embedded development services.  

In addition to increased space, expanding our Fabrication Studio allows our manufacturing operations to leverage several new capabilities. We will have a wide range of power availability up to 100A 480V 3 phase service to test and run equipment. DMC has also upgraded its laser engraving, laser cutting, and 3D printing capabilities. Improved loading dock access will allow us to accommodate a greater variety of projects. 

DMC Chicago Fabrication Studio supports a wide range of projects, from small custom builds to volume contract manufacturing. DMC can handle everything from procurement and design to manufacturing and production line setup. Every system is fabricated with attention to detail and optimized for performance in real-world conditions. 

Learn more about DMC’s Chicago Fabrication Studio and contact us for your next project. 

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Welcome to DMC Seattle

We kicked off the party with a yummy Mexico City-style taco bar, taquitos, quesadillas, and some mango chipotle chicken wings from Blue Water Taco Grill. 

Guests had a chance to see where our engineers come up with expert solutions in our lab and got a first-hand look at DMC's Siemens-powered DrinkBot which highlights DMC's knowledge of factory automation technologies.

Our new tilt table demo was on display. 

We shared how DMC Seattle came to be and cut the ribbon to open the office.

Check out these behind the scenes pictures from the party.

 

 

 

 

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Baseball, Brews, & A Beautiful Night

After cutting the ribbon to open DMC officially, everyone made their way to T-Mobile field to watch the Seattle Mariners play the New York Yankees.

Though the Mariner's didn't win, we had a blast munching on interesting treats (like crickets). The weather was beautiful, and the beer was cold. 

Phil Schaffer said, "My favorite part of the party was that there was so much conversation that you couldn't even hear the music playing. And there were so many people that I couldn't talk to all of them!"

 

 

 

 

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Learn more about DMC and all our service offerings. We are always hiring, so check out our career page, if you'd like to join our team.

The post Inside DMC Seattle’s Grand Opening Party appeared first on DMC, Inc..

DMC will call the historic Smith Tower home in our new centrally located office at 506 2nd Ave. Suite 910, Seattle, WA 98104. This office will help serve our continually growing client base.

While the doors officially open early this fall, we plan to hit the ground running and are already working with customers in the area. We’ve built relationships with local businesses and are very excited to continue to grow our partnerships with closer proximity very soon.

I will be leading in establishing the Seattle team as its Project Manager. Joining me will be Systems Engineers Eric Baggen, Phil Schaffer, and Samantha Valenteen. DMC Seattle will also be supported by Project Director Dan Freve, who previously led the opening of DMC’s Boston office.

DMC is very excited to join the Seattle community. Along with the fantastic culture, famous skyline, and beautiful location, we are looking forward to sipping coffee, visiting the famed Pike Place Market, sailing on Puget Sound, and eating seafood all year-round.

We see a lot of potential for growth in this new step for our company and are looking forward to many sleepless nights in Seattle working with clients new and old.

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But how do manufacturers know what impact these projects are having on their bottom line? Are they worth the cost to deploy? DMC and AltaVia, two founding members of the Siemens MEAC (Manufacturing Operations Management Expertise Alliance Center) are partnering to answer this question while bringing advanced data analytics to your factory floor. DMC provides the data collection and manufacturing intelligence tools to capture everything that happens on the factory floor. Alta Via provides the financial model and business analysis to determine the impact of changes to manufacturing metrics on financial metrics.

By providing the data collection and analytic power of Siemens WinCC and SIMATIC IT combined with the cost modeling capability of AltaVia’s ProEO, DMC and AltaVia can not only collect and analyze data coming from your factory floor, but they can also tell you how much improvements in quality, performance, and efficiency will impact your bottom line.

In short, they translate improvements in typical KPI measures such as OEE into improvements in your bottom line.

The benefits of this approach go beyond just identifying the projects with the greatest potential, they also allow you to monitor the effects of your improvement projects in real time. You can verify not only that your KPI’s are improving, but that the company bottom line is improving as well.

Customer Benefits:

• Data collection and Historian from existing equipment. Integration to existing automation systems.
• Real time and historical KPI access
• Reporting, Dashboards, and Data analysis available in: 
  • HMI/SCADA systems for Plant Floor Access
  • Web Portal for Front Office Access
  • Mobile Devices
• Tracking of improvement project’s effect on KPI’s
• Financial Modeling of plant operations. Integration into existing business systems.
• Predictive impact—Which potential projects are worth investing in?
• Real time tracking of the effect of KPI improvements on financial data—Is a project realizing its predicted impact, and why or why not?

For example, let’s suppose a manufacturer identifies that they have a tradeoff between quality and performance. They can easily optimize their line performance to maximize output and thus, their top line revenue. They could even go a step further and adjust for the wasted raw material to optimize profitability. But what they don’t know is the secondary cost of producing bad product or the secondary benefits of increased production. There may be costs to identify, evaluate, and dispose of this product that are not easily captured in this optimization. There may be reduced labor costs or scheduling optimizations that are realized from better productivity. Further, their optimized performance for profitability is not where they achieve maximum OEE. The combination of DMC’s and AltaVia’s performance captures all of this information and provides a more detailed and actionable picture of plant performance.

In this case, the manufacturer needs to couple quality improvements before or as part of their performance improvement initiative. Only then will the performance improvements not only increase OEE, but overall profitability as well. Thus, you can turn your data directly into dollars.

Learn more about DMC's Siemens Solutions.

The post Turning Data into Dollars using MES and MOM appeared first on DMC, Inc..

By joining the CoE, DMC gains access to an outstanding partner network of experts, allowing our engineers to extend their expertise in providing high performing and quality systems to DMC customers. In addition to offering solutions in our core competencies of Manufacturing Automation & Intelligence and laboratory automation, DMC can leverage experts in scheduling, planning, quality management, and other important components of MOM. 

In addition, DMC’s participation in the MEAC gives us access to the latest tools for analyzing, planning, implementing, and executing MOM solutions and proving the value these systems can provide to manufacturing organizations. DMC can provide expertise in the following areas:

• Identify how MOM solutions fit into an organization
• Determine the cost, benefits, and calculate the ROI of proposed MOM implementation options
• Develop System Requirements 
• Project Management
• Project Execution
• Training
• Support Services
• Future Expansion and Scalability

DMC looks forward to extending the value our customers are able to receive from MOM and MES solutions through our involvement with the Siemens MEAC.

Learn more about DMC’s manufacturing execution system services.

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• Easy OEE Calculation
• Integration into WinCC SCADA
• Web-Based Access
• Downtime Recording and Analysis

Learn more about DMC’s manufacturing execution systems services.

The post SIMATIC IT Line Monitoring Tool for Overall Equipment Effectiveness appeared first on DMC, Inc..

DMC partnered with Siemens MES to showcase the Simatic IT Line Monitoring System (LMS) software package. Simatic IT LMS is an ideal platform to help even small brewers improve performance in the filling and packaging areas of their breweries. 

The LMS presentation demonstrated how Simatic LMS software can be used to monitor filling and packaging equipment regardless of the level of control automation present on the machine. LMS can be configured to grab real time data from equipment PLC’s. If this data is not available, a low cost solution consisting of a few sensors and a Siemens 1200 PLC can be used. In either case, downtime occurrences and tracking of machine availability, quality, and performance can be used to calculate equipment KPI’s including Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). 

OEE is one of the most valuable indicators of machine performance and is used across a range of industries to quantify and improve machine performance. Simatic IT LMS makes it easy to convert acquired data into dashboards, reports, and corrective actions for reducing downtime, improving performance, and increasing equipment OEE.

As a Siemens SIMATIC IT Partner, DMC offers value added services helping customers realize solutions tailored to their unique business environments in order to maximize the efficiency of MES installations.

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Alex, Bruce, and Kevin did themselves damage by choosing high K’s, while the rest of the field obtained better than 95% of their points with their chosen randomness factor. In David’s case, choosing a relatively high K had little impact on his score.

Each entry was given a unique set of 630 random numbers to pick the 63 games in each of 10 brackets. So it is possible that our winner, Dean, either had great skill in choosing coefficients, or was lucky in the random number draw, or some combination of the two. In order to figure out how much of Dean’s victory was luck and how much was choosing a good entry, we ran the random numbers to find the results for 10 different outcomes using this year’s brackets to estimate the mean score and standard deviation for each entry. Using those statistics, we determined which entries were relatively lucky, and what the win probability for each entry was. We then re-ran the analysis using last year’s bracket to see how robust the results are year to year. 

The mean is an indication of how good an entry is for the specific teams and outcome of this year’s tournament. The deviation is how much luck someone had, with positive numbers being good luck and negative numbers bad luck. So Dan had the most luck, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Dean’s high mean and modest luck.

Dean’s entry dominated this year’s tournament and he had an estimated 50% chance of winning. He would have been in the mix last year as well. Bruce’s entry also stood a fair chance to win in both years. David and Alex stood a better chance last year, while Dan’s entry was much better for this year’s tournament. Ken and Kevin not only stood at the bottom of the heap in terms of average, but with low standard deviations, our brackets had little chance of making a significant impact.

Bruce and Alex led the unlucky crowd. I was surprised by just how unlucky Bruce was, as in a normal distribution only 1 in 14000 entries would be worse than Bruce’s. I had to double check his entry and that our score distribution was in fact close to normal over the range of data we produced. We ran the other 6 entries on Bruce’s random numbers and it produced similarly bad outcomes (-2.7 to -4.8 deviations) for every entry except Kevin’s—where it performed really well. (+1.0 deviation) (Note: Had I just used Bruce’s set of random numbers for every entry, I would’ve won by a landslide.)  The conclusion reached is that while our distribution is close to normal within about 2 standard deviations of the mean, larger outliers can occur more often than would be expected. This is because in some situations, the results obtained can be very dependent on one or two random numbers if they affect the bracket that results in your maximum score. In Bruce’s case, his random numbers were very unfavorable to Kentucky. Even though he rated them highly, they did not wind up winning a single one of his brackets–costing him 320 points on his best bracket and total score.

Finally, we asked the question of what were the best values possible. To answer this question, we used the same methodology above and ran the 10 entries over a broad range of parameters to narrow in on what appeared to be an optimal region. Our initial run varied all parameters from -16 to +16 using increments of powers of 2. We found that the strategy of weighting heavily on seed and tweaking the other parameters was in fact a good strategy. We set this value to 8 and varied the other parameters around 0 to try and find a near to optimal solution.

Based on the results we refined the optimum parameters down to:

W = 0 to 1
 X = -3 to -2
 Y = 2 to 3
 Z = 8
 K = 6 to 8

The combinations that produced the top mean scores are shown below. As the results show, we were able to make improvements on Dean’s entry. Since these results are very dependent on the specific outcome of this year’s tournament, there is no guarantee that they will be the best choices for next year’s tournament.

Thanks to everyone who entered. We’re already thinking ahead to next year, where you may be asked to pick the winning formula of geography, mascot, and school colors to predict the tournament’s winner.
 

The post Geek Challenge Results: March Madness Part II appeared first on DMC, Inc..

Six of our seven entrants centered their choices primarily around tournament seed, while DMC employee Dan Freve chose to highlight a combination of Win-Loss percentage and strength of schedule. Both methods proved effective as Dan, Dean, and Alex Krejcie were all still in contention heading into the last weekend of the tournament. It came down to the championship game, and had Kansas prevailed, Alex would have catapulted to the top of the standings and been the winner. The final standings:

One interesting note, about 35% of ESPN.com brackets picked Kentucky as the overall winner, while 17 of the 70 brackets (24%) created for the Geek Challenge picked Kentucky. It is no surprise that in a contest that encouraged some randomness to the results, that we picked the overall favorite less than the public at large. Six of seven entrants had Kentucky to win at least one of their 10 brackets. And the best 3 brackets would have finished somewhere in the top 90-95% of the over 6 million ESPN.com entries. This resulted in our brackets significantly underperforming the field as a whole, since picking the overall winner is so important to obtaining a high scoring bracket.

Picking higher seeds this year, including picking Kentucky to win as the overall number 1 seed, resulted in bracket score of 1200. Brackets over 1200 finished in the top 20%, and of the 70 brackets created for the Geek Challenge, 8 of them (11%) scored 1200 or better.

Stay tuned for Part II of the results where we will look at how much performance in the contest was based on skill vs. luck.

Please submit your comments to: geekchallenge@dmcinfo.com

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