Podcast: Top trends from IMTS 2024 — Emerging manufacturing tech, educational innovations, and more

TW: Yeah. And the kind of machines that are being showcased at this event especially are very delicate, very complicated machines. The kind of machines that, once you do get a contaminant upstream into the machine, it’s really difficult to clean the machine and restore it to its original operating condition. So Kaeser especially was on the ball with trying to help these companies get ahead of that curve and avoid people having to go into these delicate machines to mess with them. You know, it's sort of a truism in reliability that the more people that touch the asset, the more flaws you're going to introduce into the asset. So, the whole idea is to prevent the contamination from getting into the asset in the first place.

To that point, Sullair was focusing on a new model oil-free rotary screw compressor especially for food and beverage, chip manufacturing, pharma, any environment where you need a clean environment to keep oil from getting downstream into the product.

RS: You talked about the traditional audience for the show as being the metal cutters. This show has always been about machine tools, machining centers, cutting tools, and it still is. There's still a lot of those here. But there's so many different kinds of companies here too. The automation section is larger than it used to be. Same with additive manufacturing. What really caught my eye is we're seeing the names Google and Microsoft and Amazon Web Services on the floor. These giant tech companies are now trying to stake a claim to being in the manufacturing sector.

TW: You know, some of the CMMS companies that I've talked to are focused on how to combine data sets. That's still an issue. Breaking data out of their silos and figuring out what we can learn from combining these sets, whether it's time series data on top of machine health data, or other kinds of data. Cory Dickens over at Brightly was thinking about ways to use work order information to serve other elements of the business. I talked to him for about an hour yesterday about this. He says there's a role for work order data when it comes to serving finance and risk management, for example, that people are just trying to walk down the path.

I also want to call out MaintainX. They just launched a new product called Asset Hub, and it's an interesting sort of central clearinghouse for them to collect a lot of manuals from OEMs and have them in their CMMS for use by anybody who does use MaintainX. They can call up the product manuals for the assets that are being worked on. They can call up job plans if they're prewritten for those assets, but also the OEMs can go in and update these job plans and manuals as needed too. So, it goes both ways. If a customer needs access to the manuals, they can go in there and take a look, but also the OEMs can keep their information up to date for MaintainX users. So that was a new way of seeing various kinds of data that maintenance managers need all assembled in one place. You know, some people need to go in, and some people need to pull the data out.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

Listen to another episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast app