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what's new

Introducing Moldflow Manufacturing Solutions 2.0

By David Duarte, Moldflow Corporation

Moldflow's New Manufacturing Solutions Group Showing its commitment to delivering best-in-class process-wide plastics solutions, Moldflow recently launched the Manufacturing Solutions Group. The newly formed business unit will focus its attention and energy on Collaborative Manufacturing Management (CMM) which provides the framework for organizing and controlling the key business processes of a manufacturing enterprise. The Group will develop and market solutions geared to install rapidly and deliver an immediate ROI by increasing the quality, speed and efficiency of the injection molding manufacturing process. With ten locations in the Americas, six locations in Europe and five in Asia, the Manufacturing Solutions Group is uniquely positioned to support local as well as global organizations involved in the manufacturing of injection molded plastic products.

The release of MMS^TM (Moldflow Manufacturing Solutions^TM) 1.0 in April 2003 was a major milestone for Moldflow Corporation as it represented the integration of Moldflow's MPX® and Shotscope® technologies to co-exist on a single platform. Since the release of MMS 1.0, there has been a series of point and revision releases which have included major enhancements to MPX in automated process setup, optimization and control, as well as expanded local language support, including French, German, Italian and Hungarian implementations.

Moldflow Manufacturing Solutions 2.0

The newest version of Moldflow Manufacturing Solutions, MMS 2.0, features customer-driven enhancements to the Shotscope and MPX modules as well as improvements to the underlying data architecture, MMS Foundation, to support the most current versions of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system and the latest Borland databases.

Shotscope Enhancements

The following are some of the key new features and benefits available in the release of Shotscope:

Support for Multi-Barrel Injection Molding Machines

Many injection molding machines in use today have multiple injection units to enable the injection of different materials. One example of this would be molding rubber seals on various plastic automotive components. Another example is the production of rear taillight lenses for automobiles, requiring the use of multiple colors — for example, red, amber and clear — in a single component. Our customers have requested the ability to schedule, manage and monitor these multi-barrel machines, functionality which has been added to Shotscope.

MMS 2.0 now includes the capability to schedule, manage and monitor multi-brarrel injection molding machines.

In general, multi-barrel machines are used in two different ways within a plant. The first method is a sequential use of the barrels, where the first barrel injection cycle occurs and is followed by the second barrel injection cycle. This method is often used to inject two different materials into a mold. The second method is the parallel use of the barrels, where each barrel can be injected independently of the other(s). Shotscope now supports both of these multi-barrel configurations.

Ability to Manage Multiple Machine Operators

Many of our customers routinely assign multiple operators to one injection molding machine. Depending on the production requirements and production line speed, there is the need to provide additional labor for activities such as flash removal, quality inspections or packaging of the components. With the latest release of Shotscope, these customers will now have the ability to assign and manage the association of multiple operators for login and logout, as well as data entry for scrap, downtime and changes to mold cavitation and material lot control numbers. This improved functionality in Shotscope provides additional flexibility, allowing our customers to use Shotscope in a manner consistent with their current business practices.

Enhancements for the Metal Die Cast Industry

We have served the monitoring needs of the die cast market for many years with Shotscope. As the die cast process has its own unique set of criteria for process monitoring we have created Shotscope FX and given it the most popular enhancement request from this customer group, a new process display format. Shotscope FX for die casters is a hybrid display, showing the velocity and pressure as a function of position, with a switch over to a time-based display in mid-cycle.

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The new position-based display capability enhances monitoring of metal die cast processes.

This hybrid, position-based display is the industry accepted format and is essential to our continued participation and growth in this important market segment. This new display option available in Shotscope FX advances Moldflow's support of the die cast market.

Documentation of the Database Schema

Many of our customers desire custom applications written on top of our collaborative manufacturing management (CMM) applications to enable functionality unique to their manufacturing or business processes. Supplying documentation of the database schema will provide our customers with the database structure and dependencies, enabling the efficient development of custom applications, queries and reports. This open format is part of our continued commitment to provide maximum product value to our customer base. If preferred, our Custom Applications group can be consulted to assist with custom development requirements.

Enhanced Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Interface System

Linking real-time manufacturing operations data with enterprise-wide management systems helps to achieve real-time performance management (RPM), which is a management practice that measures performance in real-time where the measures are used to adjust production targets to exploit current market conditions and improve business agility. To enable seamless communication with the world's leading ERP systems, we have implemented a robust, user-friendly application programming interface (API) for both inbound and outbound communication as part of MMS Foundation.

Legacy Product Migration

For customers using older versions of MPX and Shotscope, we have developed a clear and concise facility to migrate the data from the older versions to the new ones in MMS Foundation. This new facility allows customers running Shotscope 2.6 and MPX 3.2 to easily upgrade to the latest versions of Shotscope and MPX without any loss of historical data or configuration and calibration settings.

Ease-of-Use Product Improvements

Enhancements to the operator station user interface in Shotscope improve data entry and ease-of-use. Information such as scrap entry, downtime entry, lot/cavitation, etc. can now be entered easily through a series of graphical, intuitive icons.

Injection Molding Machine Controller Interface Support

New in MMS Foundation is a bi-directional communication interface with Ferromatik Milacron's new XTREEM^TM XP control, expected to be shipping worldwide on all Ferromatik Milacron molding machines by the end of 2004. The interface allows for direct integration of all Moldflow's CMM suite of products onto the Ferromatik Milacron controller hardware — eliminating the need for any external or additional hardware. In addition, bi-directional communication interfaces are supported for the following machine/control platforms:

Supported Operating Systems and Recommended Hardware Requirements

Touchscreen PCs , Client Workstations and Non-touchscreen Data Collectors

Database Server

To summarize, the latest version of Shotscope contains significant new features and functionality including multi-barrel injection molding machine support, expanded machine operator tracking and a hybrid position based display in the FX version for the metal die casting industry. MMS Foundation has added database schema documentation and enhanced ERP interface capability.

Building upon its broad set of existing CMM applications, Moldflow will continue to set the standard for process setup and monitoring, manufacturing optimization, control and production monitoring software tools for the plastics injection molding and metal die casting industries.

For more information about Moldflow Manufacturing Solutions products, visit www.moldflow.com/products/MMS/.