The Solution Family provides a complete set of products that combine to target the Hardware, Engineering and Management levels of your production process.   A Quick Start Platform serves as the turn-key hardware solution that enables modern and legacy machine integration with simple clip on sensors.  Solution Builder® is designed for your engineers to discover, investigate and extend your production improvements.  Solution Manager serves as a single, at a glance, management system for your entire production process. The Solution Family builds upon the MTConnect® standard for Machine Tool Communications.  The Solution Family distributes the information throughout the Quick Start Platforms connected to your machines eliminating the need for expensive servers and infrastructure. Low cost delivery of solutions serves as the primary design goal. Legacy and modern machines are enabled with a “No machine left behind” approach. The Solution Family enables production monitoring through Power Monitoring on Quick Start Platforms or connecting to either MTConnect® Agents or OPC machine tool interfaces. New and existing machines are integrated in minutes through simple wizards.  Turn–key solutions allow for automatic characterization of machines and parts enabling you to become operational in minutes. The Solution Family seemlessly provides a solution for both small and large shop operations without compromise in features or increase in complexity.  The Solution Family brings and entirely new approach to Production Management and Improvement through an innovative use of technology while overcoming traditional contraints that have prevented the machine tool industry from monitoring and improving their production processes.

The industrial automation community and the machine tool industry have struggled for years with many attempts at communication standards.  Each technology had its own difficulties with operating systems, firewalls or vendor acceptance.  The MTConnect® Standard was designed as a “universal factory floor communications protocol” that answered these concerns through the use of web technologies that are operating system, firewall and vendor independent.  The MTConnect® Standard is designed specifically for the shop floor environment.   The MTConnect® Standard’s unique solution is  to create a “dictionary” for machine tool data. Each detail of the machine is provided with full context – name, definition, scaling etc.  This dictionary allows vendors to confidently implement their solutions knowing that customers will not be frustrated with the technology hurdles of the past.

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