mtconnect.org

In a typical day in a manufacturing facility there are hundreds or thousands of machines and independent systems operating in consortia to insure a product is manufactured in a timely, quality and cost-effective manner. Each of these machines and systems accumulates information on its operation and, usually, is unable to communicate it to anyone or anything else. This may not be true in all cases, but overall, it is difficult to communicate information and process data among these machines and systems. As a result, coordination, optimization or data tracking to insure the machine, factory or system is operating at an acceptable level (think machine efficiency, process flow, energy usage, toolpath validation, etc.) is very difficult.