New Technology
On TRAK to Industry 4.0 TRAK Machine Tools brings digitalization to job shops
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ob shop owners know digitalization is coming. Now, they have a familiar and trusted machine tool partner to help them meet the challenge. “There’s the closing scene in the first ‘Terminator’ movie,” says TRAK Machine Tools owner Steve Pinto. “Sarah Connor is escaping because she knows that Skynet is coming. She’s in Mexico, and a young boy points to the horizon speaking in Spanish that a storm is coming. And she looks off and she says, ‘I know.’” Job shops are facing the digital adoption challenge across two fronts—toolroom and production. “The transition across the business will be difficult for job shops,” Pinto says. “Especially owners that do not have teams of engineers and IT specialists to help them evaluate and integrate new, digitally enabled machining operations.”
28 | IMD JANUARY 2022
As a first step to help shops on the toolroom side, TRAK developed a line of machining centers, powered by the company’s popular ProtoTRAK® CNC. Now the company is introducing an all-new line of production-level machines empowered by the Siemens SINUMERIK ONE “digital twin” CNC platform.
The Transition to Digitalization Tom Copeland is TRAK Chief Technology Officer. During his 40 years with the company, he has seen how job shops can fall behind during technology transitions. “Most shops are still at step one, getting started with what I call the dashboard era,” Copeland explains. “They are basically connecting machines to software applications, then monitoring those machines from a managerial dashboard. The benefits of this first step are to sort out connectivity
