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INDUSTRY 4.0
MTM – Pressing the button on Industry 4.0 Melbourne-based manufactured MTM embarked on an Industry 4.0 journey a few years ago, when faced with the impending departure of a key staff member. The company saw an opportunity to expand its Industry 4.0 strategy to eliminate wasteful activity, and the resulting project could have far-reaching implications for the business. Max Albert founded Melbourne Tooling Co in 1965. Initially based in Huntingdale, in Melbourne’s south-east suburbs, the company started out as a toolmaking operation, and soon made a name for itself providing tooling for the local automotive industry. Within a few years it diversified into the design and manufacture of automotive components, and established itself as a key supplier to the original five Australian car manufacturers Ford, GM Holden, Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi. Today the company, now rebranded as MTM Pty Ltd, remains privately owned by the Albert family, with Max’s son Mark Albert now its Managing Director, but the business is a truly global operation. The closure of Australia’s car industry has seen MTM diversify into areas such as rail, water conservation and safety, but automotive components still account for a substantial part of the company’s business. Its customer base amounts to a roll-call of global car brands, including GM, Ford and Cadillac, Toyota and Mazda, MG and JMC. The company has assembly plants in the US and China, but all design and the more advanced manufacturing operations still take place at its 18,900sqm plant in Oakleigh South, which employs a workforce of around 80 staff. MTM’s press shop is equipped with two power presses: a 200-ton machine, and a 160-machine. The tools on these machines would get worn after a certain number of strokes, and regular preventative maintenance is essential. Ensuring that this was undertaken at the right time to keep the machines running was undertaken by three members of staff. Suresh Jayan, Plant Manager at MTM, explains: “We had a press shop operator who would manually record the number of strokes, and then go into the press shop office, where a supervisor sat down and tabulated the data. And then on a weekly basis he had a meeting with the toolroom supervisor, and they planned in the preventive maintenance of tools.” This system obviously represented a fairly mundane task for the three staff involved, and was arguably not very efficient, but nonetheless it was working well enough to meet MTM’s needs. However, the problem really started to arise when it emerged that all three members of staff were planning to leave. “It left us no choice but to automate. We didn’t have the manpower anymore. If we didn’t automate this, guess who’d have
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The press shop at MTM is equipped with two power presses: a 200-ton machine, and a 160-machine.
to do it?” Jayan laughs. “I didn’t want it to have to be me.”
Finding the smart solution In tackling the problem, MTM turned to Balluff, which worked with Jayan and his team to develop a proposed solution. Further support came through AMTIL, whose CEO Shane Infanti and Corporate Services Manager Greg Chalker helped to secure some financial assistance for an Industry 4.0 pilot program via the Federal Government’s Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC). “When we initially looked at the project we had the opportunity to involve Greg and Shane in helping us to help MTM to secure some funding,” recalls Jim Wallace, National Sales Manager at Balluff. So that kind of got the ball rolling in getting a couple of installations running.” Balluff’s solution involved fitting the press tool with an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag, which communicates with a reader inside the machine to count each stroke as the press passes up and down. This enables MTM to accurately count the “shot”, the number of times a tool has been operated since it last underwent preventative maintenance. With that number always available, the tool room can always be informed in real time how close each tool is to needing its next round of maintenance. “Balluff’s system is standalone, and one of the beautiful things about it is it doesn’t need to be integrated
into the machine,” adds Wallace. “And these guys have done a terrific job to really build on that, taking a really general simple system and integrating it further into their production process.” While Balluff’s initial solution was elegant in its simplicity, it was MTM’s in-house team of Darren Symington, Information Systems Manager, and Daniel Zhu, Information Systems Administrator, who took the system to the next level. The project provided the starting point for a much broader upgrade of the way they were handling information from the press shop. “Initially we were just dumping the data from the device onto a spreadsheet,” says Symington. “That file was accessible to the guys in the tool room, who had to update the data. What we’ve done now is we’ve bypassed the file and put it into a SQL database. And we’ve just migrated to Office 365, so we’ve set up a SharePoint departmental site, like an intranet, where everybody can get to this page to see what the preventative maintenance status is.”
MTM’s plant in Oakleigh South
