GLA Summit 2021/Cloud Manufacturing with Medulla
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| Conference | GLA Summit 2021 |
| Presenters | Neil Baker Kurt Friday |
Cloud Manufacturing with Medulla by Neil Baker and Kurt Friday
All manufacturers struggle to some degree on how to connect their manufacturing lines to systems that provide end-to-end traceability, autonomous supervision, and quality control. Most commercially available solutions, often bundled as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), are typically large enterprise-wide systems that are complex and prohibitively expensive for small to medium-sized (SME) manufacturers. The integration effort is also a huge barrier to most SME manufacturers when considering off-the-shelf solutions. By the end of the investigative process, most opt to just use paper travelers, spreadsheets, or ad-hoc databases that get (re)developed far too frequently. These solutions do not scale very well. And for those operating in regulated industries, such as medical devices or automotive manufacturing, there isn't much time before paper record-keeping processes will no longer be accepted as part of an approved quality management system. Medulla has developed a cloud-based MES that fits the needs of SMEs in both regulated and unregulated industries. It provides auditable traceability, and workflow management as well as secure real-time visibility into production line metrics and production data from anywhere you happen to be. It is inexpensive and easy to configure with simple APIs that allow direct interaction between the platform and your test and manufacturing equipment. You can also set the level of operator integration, from low-touch webforms running on tablets or touchscreens to full machine-level integration. This presentation will provide an overview and demonstration of the Medulla manufacturing platform interacting with test systems running Medulla's LabVIEW test executive and MES connectors. Our test executive and MES toolkit are both parts of our soon-to-be open-source ViPER framework. Refer to Kurt Friday's presentation to learn more about ViPER.