EVERETT — Fluke Corp. kicked off a six-city road show Tuesday for industry professionals to talk about best practices on an evolving factory floor.
The tour also is a chance for the Everett maker of hand-held test tools and portable sensors to tout its marriage with eMaint Enterprises, which makes computerized maintenance-management software.
About 150 industry professionals gathered at the Fluke campus for the first leg of the tour. Exotic Metals Forming Company’s Cory Scott wanted to hear more about how Fluke and eMaint are coming together.
Exotic Metals, an aerospace company which employs 1,300 in Kent and in Airway Heights near Spokane, uses Fluke tools and eMaint software. Scott said he’s “praying for integration” of the tools and the software.
“I think the integration of the two is going to help us out astronomically in the long run,” Scott said. “It’s the way of the future. Factories now move so quickly and so fast, it’s tough to keep up.”
Fluke’s parent company, Fortive, purchased eMaint last fall. eMaint, with offices in Florida and Ireland, produces software used by people who maintain machinery and equipment in all sorts of manufacturing, from food processing to health care to fleets and other industries.
The idea is to pair Fluke’s tools with eMaint’s cloud-based software. Machines connecting with machines is a central theme of what is called Industry 4.0, the current trend of automation and data exchange in factories.
At Tuesday’s session, Fluke CEO Wes Pringle said he’s happy that his company and eMaint are on the cusp of the trend.
“This week has been years in the coming,” Pringle said.
He hoped the professionals gathered would voice their needs as well as concerns.
Gordon Martinez and Stephen Henkel, who work for Legend Brands in Burlington, came to learn more about the move toward “smart” factories.
“I’m hearing more and more in the news and trade mags about Industry 4.0,” said Henkel, the company’s vice president of manufacturing technology. “That’s an area we’re looking at developing a program and strategy for.”
Legend Brands, which employs 300, makes equipment and chemicals for professional cleaners and facility maintenance, as well as for smoke and fire remediation and water-damage restoration. The partnership between Fluke and eMaint could be extremely useful for their business, Henkel said.
“From our perpsective, to be able to monitor and report how many cycles a machine has done today versus yesterday versus this time last year is valuable information for a manufacturer,” Henkel said.
Martinez, who is Legend Brand’s lean manufacturing coordinator, likened the partnership of Fluke and eMaint to creating smart devices such as the thermostat Nest — but for factories instead of homes.
“Machine up-time is one of your biggest issues in production,” Martinez said. “If the machine is going to need to be fixed, let’s have it done Tuesday rather than have it break down and be down a week while we’re waiting for parts.”
Exotic Metal’s Scott, who runs his company’s eMaint software, said every machine that vibrates puts out a frequency, and changes in that frequency can mean that repairs may soon be needed. Hot spots, which can be measured with Fluke remote heat sensors, might also mean fixes are needed.
His company’s workers collect data on machinery all of the time, and that information is loaded manually into eMaint software. If the information is loaded directly from Fluke’s tools into eMaint’s software, it would save hours of work.
“It will be costly at first, but in the long run I think it’s going to save tons of man hours,” Scott said. “It will open the doors for our maintenance team to do more preventative maintenance more than reactive maintenance, which is fixing things after they fail.”
Fluke and eMaint will continue the tour this week with a stop in Chicago then head to Atlanta; Austin, Texas; and San Diego before finishing up in Philadelphia at the end of the month.
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