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MEMEX - Data-Driven Manufacturing Application

MEMEX Announces $500 thousand Deal with SEW-EURODRIVE for Plant-Wide Deployment of MEMEX MERLIN TEMPUS EE

Another MERLIN Pilot Transitions into Full Plant Rollout

BURLINGTON, ON–(Marketwired – Jul 12, 2017) – Memex Inc. (“MEMEX” or the “Company”) (TSX VENTURE: OEE) announced it has received a purchase order from SEW-EURODRIVE for $500 thousand (approx.) in a plant-wide deployment of MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition (EE) and MERLIN DNC software.

SEW-EURODRIVE, the Lyman, South Carolina-based producer of gearmotors and drive-based automation solutions, will install MEMEX’s machine-monitoring solutions onto most of the factory equipment housed in its 250,000 square-foot manufacturing facility.

“SEW-EURODRIVE researched very carefully for the right supplier of automated machine monitoring solutions and determined that MEMEX’s MERLIN was best able to capture the quality of data we were looking for,” said Jess Galloway, SEW-EURODRIVE’s Manufacturing Superintendent. Chuck Chandler, Plant Manager, added, “It is important for a world class manufacturing facility to have visibility of all operations and the use of these advanced data-driven manufacturing techniques extends our competitive edge.”

“We’re proud that SEW-EURODRIVE selected MEMEX after a thorough and careful competitive evaluation process,” said MEMEX President and CEO David McPhail. “SEW-EURODRIVE started with a MERLIN pilot, and has now committed to a full-plant roll-out of MERLIN Tempus EE and MERLIN DNC. This says a lot about how much value SEW-EURODRIVE places in the adoption of a data-driven manufacturing approach and in the MEMEX solution, in particular. We’re excited to work with SEW-EURODRIVE and are looking forward to helping this industry-leading manufacturer use data-driven manufacturing to achieve its business productivity and efficiency goals.”

About MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition and MERLIN DNC
The MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition works on MEMEX’s core MERLIN software platform, enhancing machine monitoring capabilities by adding additional metrics like Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) — the industry standard measure of factory efficiency.

MERLIN DNC is a software plug-in to the MERLIN platform. It offers a browser-based interface that connects legacy CNC tools to modern networks, and allows CNC programs and data to be easily transferred.

About SEW-EURODRIVE
SEW-EURODRIVE is a world leader in drive technology and a pioneer in drive-based automation. Since introducing the gearmotor in 1931, the company has had a history of innovations, including the first variable speed gearmotor, early electronic drives, and the first motor with energy-efficient copper rotors. Over the last seven years, the company’s Lyman, South Carolina plant has more than doubled its manufacturing capacity to meet growing customer demand.

About MEMEX
Memex Inc. was founded with a vision to improve the way automated machinery and production equipment work and connect on the factory floor. Since then MEMEX has proved itself a pioneer in IIoT time and again. The company is committed to its mission of “successfully transforming factories of today into factories of the future” and envisions converting every machine into a node on the corporate network, creating visibility from shop-floor-to-top-floor. MEMEX is the developer of MERLIN, an award-winning IIoT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in Real Time. MEMEX’s software and hardware IIoT solution enable customers to achieve tangible IIoT-centric business outcomes. The MERLIN software suite and connectivity products have enabled manufacturers to achieve upwards of a 50% increase in productivity and a 20%-plus increase in profit, on average. Additionally, customers have secured payback in less than four months, which equates to an Internal Rate of Return greater than 300 per cent. For more information, please visit: www.MemexOEE.com

 

For investor inquiries please contact:

 

Rashi Rathore, Marketing Manager

905-635-3040 ext. 103

Rashi.Rathore@MemexOEE.com

 

David McPhail, President & CEO

519-993-1114

david.mcphail@MemexOEE.com

 

 

Sean Peasgood, Investor Relations

416-565-2805

sean@sophiccapital.com

MEMEX - Manufacturing Productivity

MEMEX Inc. announces MERLIN Tempus™ and MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition Available for First Customer Ship (FCS)

Customer Beta Trial Feedback is Encouraging

BURLINGTON, ON–(Marketwired – Feb 21, 2017) – Memex Inc. (“MEMEX”) (TSX VENTURE: OEE) is pleased to announce the official release of MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition (EE), the next generation of our award-winning MERLIN Manufacturing Execution System software platforms.

Dave McPhail, President and CEO of MEMEX Inc., stated, “Following our Tempus debut at IMTS last September, we received significant interest in the platform’s next-generation, machine monitoring / analytics capabilities. Several of these inquiries led to beta tests with a number of clients and prospects, and their feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

With MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus EE, MEMEX is again redefining what it means to truly know what is happening in your manufacturing operations, regardless of industry vertical served. MEMEX has long been recognized as the leader in both shop floor monitoring, as well as providing MTConnect software and hardware solutions for any piece of manufacturing equipment on the plant floor. These new products will further differentiate MEMEX from the competition.

MEMEX’s entirely new software and hardware platforms build upon the success of the current award-winning MERLIN software suite and connectivity products, which has enabled manufacturers to achieve upwards of a 50% increase in productivity, a 20% plus increase in profit on just a 10% increase in OEE and payback in less than four months, which all equates to an Internal Rate of Return greater than 300%.”

About MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition:

MERLIN Tempus is an open and extensible Manufacturing Execution System (MES) platform that offers the next generation of tools and a dynamic configurable dashboard that provides a complete customizable view of shop floor operations. Tempus is Latin for time. MERLIN Tempus measures and analyzes manufacturing time. MERLIN Tempus tells manufacturers exactly how time is being used on their shop floors, with operators, with sensors and with any type of manufacturing asset. Developed using state-of-the-art software engineering technologies, including .NET and RESTful API’s, MERLIN Tempus delivers green-light metrics and analytical capabilities to effectively reduce downtime while increasing throughput and profits. MERLIN Tempus EE extends the capabilities of the MERLIN Tempus platform with full Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and integrated job scheduling. MERLIN Tempus supports MTConnect, Fanuc Focas, Fanuc I/O link to MTConnect®, OPC and other software protocols.

MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus EE are highly scalable, extensible and are open Manufacturing Execution System platforms. This is significant because it greatly simplifies and truly enables customers and partners to build upon the countless features and services MERLIN Tempus has to offer.

About MEMEX:

MEMEX, the developer of MERLIN, an award winning IIoT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in Real-Time, is the global leader in machine to machine connectivity solutions. Committed to its mission of “Successfully transforming factories of today into factories of the future” and encouraged by the accelerating adoption and success of MERLIN, MEMEX is relentlessly pursuing the development of increasingly innovative solutions suitable in the IIoT era. MEMEX envisions converting every machine into a node on corporate networks, thereby, creating visibility from shop-floor-to-top-floor. MEMEX, with its deep commitment towards machine connectivity, offers solutions that are focused on finding hidden capacity by measuring and managing Real-Time data. This empowers MEMEX’s customers to effectively quantify and manage OEE, reduce costs and incorporate strategies for continuous lean improvement.

Media Contacts

David McPhail
CEO
Phone: 519-993-1114
Email: david.mcphail@memexoee.com

Rashi Rathore
Marketing Manager
Phone: 905-635-3040 ext 103
Email: Rashi.Rathore@memexoee.com

Investor Relations
Sean Peasgood
Investor Relations
Phone: 416-565-2805
Email: Sean@SophicCapital.com

 

MEMEX - FROST & SULLIVAN 2016 AWARD

Frost & Sullivan recognizes MEMEX Inc. as 2016 Global Product leader in Machine Monitoring System

SANTA CLARA, California, Jan. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Based on its recent analysis of the global machine monitoring systems market, Frost & Sullivan has recognized MEMEX Inc. with the 2016 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Leadership. With this award, MEMEX receives worldwide acclaim for its turnkey machine monitoring and automation solutions, especially its flagship product, MERLIN, a next generation scalable IIoT communication platform. The company continuously improves its products to stay relevant to a cross section of customers from the aerospace, automotive, and advanced industrial sectors. It further sets itself apart with its outstanding technical service, support, training, and software developm

By offering true shop floor to top floor communication and visibility at plant- and enterprise-level along with enhanced data collection, and tailored reporting capabilities, MERLIN presents specific data results that customers need to make strategic decisions reducing their overall capital expenditure. The MERLIN platform connects the shop floor with the top floor of any manufacturing facility by leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Mega Trend in its overall concept and design. Acknowledging the importance of user friendliness, MEMEX designed the system in a way that the installed communications base and open machine integration software collects and houses all machinery data in a single, easy-to-access control panel and displays the data on an interactive dashboard. Furthermore, MERLIN  helps customers track and understand various performance metrics displayed on its system dashboard and performance trend charts.

“One of the distinguishing features of MERLIN is its operator portal, with its ability to perform machine-related operator inputs through a Microsoft Windows-based application,” said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst, Rohit Karthikeyan. “This parameter-driven software allows operators to quickly tailor the operator portal to display the information they need on their personal devices. It makes the machine information accessible while still channeling operator information inputs, commands, and notices through the plant’s communication platform.”

Underlining its commitment to innovation, MEMEX expanded MERLIN’s offerings to include:

  • MERLIN Tempus, which supports enterprise-level machine connections and serves as a platform for shop floor communications
  • MERLIN MES, which enhances monitoring and browser-based graphical display capabilities for complete manufacturing execution systems
  • MERLIN DNC, which facilitates file transfers to machines from computer-aided drawing and manufacturing programs
  • MERLIN FOEE, which provides specialized financial overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) metrics to visualize real-time hourly profit contribution by product
  • MERLIN MTC-One, a circuit board hardware that connects machines to a network with multiple analog and digital inputs

MEMEX has taken innovation a step further by including product features such as the HTML-based widgets in the dashboard presentation layers of MERLIN. These widgets permit customers to smoothly tailor their data reporting to show only specific and relevant machine performance information to production teams. Combined, these features result in a highly scalable data reporting solution.

“MEMEX looks to make ‘cross-industry machine connections’ by providing machine and process monitoring, OEE, and communications functionalities,” noted Karthikeyan. “No other machine monitoring system offers such a solution, and it helped MEMEX achieve its mission of measuring manufacturing excellence.”

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that develops a product with innovative features and functionality that is gaining rapid acceptance in the market. The award recognizes the solution quality and the customer value enhancements it enables.

Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for outstanding achievement in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research.

About MEMEX

MEMEX Inc., the developer of MERLIN, an award winning IIoT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in Real-Time, is the global leader in machine to machine connectivity solutions. Committed to its mission of “Successfully transforming factories of today into factories of the future” and encouraged by the accelerating adoption and success of MERLIN, MEMEX is relentlessly pursuing the development of increasingly innovative solutions suitable in the IIoT era. MEMEX envisions converting every machine into a node on the corporate network, thereby, creating visibility from shop-floor-to-top-floor. MEMEX, with its deep commitment towards machine connectivity, offers solutions that are focused on finding hidden capacity by measuring and managing Real-Time data. This empowers MEMEX’s customers to effectively quantify and manage OEE, reduce costs and incorporate strategies for continuous lean improvement. For more information, please visit: www.MemexOEE.com

Media Contact
MEMEX Inc.:
David McPhail, CEO
Phone: 519-993-1114
Email: david.mcphail@MemexOEE.com

Rashi Rathore, Marketing Manager
Phone: 905-635-3040 ext 103
Email: Rashi.Rathore@MemexOEE.com

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today’s market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.

Contact:

Chiara Carella
P: +44 (0) 207.343.8314
F: 210.348.1003
E: chiara.carella@frost.com

Click here to read more

 

MEMEX - DAVID MCPHAIL CEO interviewed

“Our Product Generates Over 300% IRR,” Says Memex’s CEO

Memex’s Merlin platform measures overall equipment effectiveness

SmallCapPower was at the Canadian Innovation Exchange’s Public Investor Day in November and had an exclusive chat with David McPhail, President and CEO of Memex Inc. (CVE:OEE). The Company’s main product, Merlin, is both a software and hardware platform product that uses three metrics to calculate overall equipment effectiveness (hence their stock symbol) and generates nearly 50% productivity improvement. Find out how Merlin helps to generate over 300% internal return rate of capital, and OEE’s plans to solidify its position as a market leader in North America.

 

Click here to watch the video interview 

MEMEX - IIoT

The IIoT or Industry 4.0: Who will win?

Written by Dave Edstrom & David McPhail, Memex | Tuesday October 11, 2016
Oct. 11, 2016 – At Memex, we are frequently asked questions about both the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0. The questions usually start off, “What do you see happening in [IIoT/Industry 4.0]?” The conversation will quickly zero in on their real concern, which is to find an answer to the question: “What and when should I be doing something with [IIoT/Industry 4.0]?”
Conceptually, are either IIoT or Industry 4.0 really new in manufacturing? The answer to that question is an emphatic “no.” One only needs to go back 36 years to the Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) effort led by GM to see just one standardization attempt applied to manufacturing. For either to be successful, they must provide a net bottom line benefit for the dollars invested by delivering tangible and measurable business outcome(s).At Memex, we would argue what is changing even faster is that manufacturing is catching up, and even surpassing, other industries in truly understanding what is happening on the plant floor. Only two to four per cent of all shops or plants are monitored, a fact Dave Edstrom, Memex CTO, picked up when surveying the industry during his time as president and chairman of the board of the MTConnect Institute. When asked, most plant or shop managers will state their plant utilization is in the 65 to 75 per cent range. When hardware/software is deployed that can properly quantify this number, it is shown time and again to be actually 25 to 32 per cent. A significant inflection point for both IIoT and Industry 4.0 is MTConnect. A fact that cannot be overstated is that the open and royalty-free manufacturing interconnectivity standard MTConnect has been a huge enabler for manufacturing and provides the viable highway for information sharing from the shop floor to the top floor.

The evolution
Industry 4.0 first came to life in 2011. The name Industry 4.0 represents the fourth industrial revolution, with steam power being the first, mass production using electricity being the second, and digital computing being the third revolution for improving manufacturing. It is interesting to note in 1966, Karl Steinbuch, a German computer scientist, stated, “In a few decades’ time, computers will be interwoven into almost every industrial product.”

Industry 4.0 recognizes there are significant technical challenges that all come into play and the only way to address those are with a comprehensive framework. A key paper for Industry 4.0 is the Working Paper No. 01/2015, titled Design Principles for Industrie 4.0 Scenarios: A Literature Review by Mario Hermann, Tobias Pentek, and Boris Otto. In this paper, they bring out key design principles for Industry 4.0:

• Interoperability
• Virtualization
• Decentralization
• Real-time capability
• Service orientation
• Modularity

Interoperability is listed as the first design principle and this is where a standard, such as MTConnect, becomes critically important. While MTConnect is not yet part of Industry 4.0, there are conversations going on at very high levels. This fact was stated by Prof. Dr.- Ing. Dr. h.c. Detlef Zühlke when he sat on an Industry 4.0 panel with Dave Edstrom, Memex CTO, at McMaster University this past April.

GE is credited with coining the term IIoT, while Cisco is credited with coining the term IoT. By adding Industrial to Internet of Things, how does GE differentiate the two? We find the following on the GE Digital blog: “In today’s ever-changing and volatile market, manufacturers seek a single version of the truth that will help them make the right decisions for improving profitability, while at the same time mitigating risk as much as possible. They wish to grow their profits and their organization, while ensuring safety for employees, the general public and the environment. To obtain all of this, they need increased visibility and better insights into the performance of their equipment and assets.”

GE is positioning IIoT brilliantly in its commercials. In one, “Owen” is given a hammer by his father and is told it was his grandfathers. Owen’s father asks Owen to pick it up. Owen tells his parents that while GE builds industrial equipment, he will be writing software that will allow machines to speak to each other. These commercials are laying the groundwork for data-driven manufacturing.

Taking advantage of the platform
Now that we have provided the definitions directly from the sources and the relevant context, let’s look at how we would respond to the next question, “What does Memex see happening in [IIoT/Industry 4.0]?” For many, IIoT means that after a plant has attached all of their manufacturing equipment, they come to the conclusion that data analysis begets more data analysis and they want to start adding sensors — everywhere. These sensors include coolant, vibration, temperature, humidity, motion, current and amperage, to name just a few. These sensors come into play after shops have electronically connected to their major assets, such as machine tools and operators. This attention on connecting everything in manufacturing underscores the importance of interoperability, the first design principle of Industry 4.0.

What both of these efforts are trying to establish is to be the platform for manufacturing. What is a platform? Microsoft Windows, Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Apple’s OS X are all examples of platforms. A platform is not just the operating system, but it is also the rules of the road in terms of interoperability between systems, security, licensing, interfaces, reference implementations, working groups and countless other critical aspects of a platform. Building a platform that becomes an industry standard is extremely difficult and expensive.

What should a shop owner or plant manager being doing today with either IIoT or Industry 4.0?

The tremendous interest in both Industry 4.0 and IIoT are proving the point that many of us in manufacturing have known for years manufacturing is ripe for analytics. Both Industry 4.0 and IIoT fall into the data-driven manufacturing camp. Woody Allen once said, “If you live in a country run by a committee, make sure you are on the committee.” Your level of involvement today with these efforts should directly reflect the possible outcomes and the tangible net business benefits to your business. If you are running a large plant with many software developers, you might want to invest some of a software developer’s time into either investigating these efforts or possibly joining Industry 4.0.

What steps should a plant manager take with either IIoT or Industry 4.0?

• Realize these efforts are a means to an end, not an end in itself.
• The bottom line with any effort in manufacturing should answer the fundamental question, “How does this help me improve my efficiency so I can make more parts and more profits with less resources in less time?”
• Far and away, the best investment of time is to truly understand what is happening on your plant floor. The way to accomplish this is with a shop floor monitoring system. The ROI of shop floor monitoring is measured in weeks and months, delivering an average of 300 per cent Internal Return Rate of capital — the percentage is based on the information we track from our customers.
• When it comes time to connect your assets on your shop floor, use MTConnect as the interconnectivity standard.
• If you are one of the less than five per cent who have completely connected your plant floor and can see exactly what is happening on any given manufacturing asset at anytime and from anywhere, then you should start looking into where it makes sense to work with Industry 4.0.

In our opinion, IIoT for manufacturing is really about adding sensors to manufacturing and the basic challenge is interoperability; interoperability is always the challenge in computers.

Will IIoT or Industry 4.0 be the MAP of the 21st century and end up in the graveyard of industrial standards initiatives that promised much but didn’t deliver, or will both truly be worthy of the term “revolution?” Only time will tell, but our bet is it doesn’t matter what you call it, if you are not connecting your plant’s assets to be monitored, then it is not if you will go out of business, but when.

David McPhail is the CEO and president of Memex, and a current member of Manufacturing AUTOMATION’s editorial advisory board. He has chaired several working groups of U.S.-based MTConnect Institute. Dave Edstrom is the CTO for Memex, as well as the former president and chairman of the board for the MTConnect Institute. Based in Burlington, Ont., Memex is the global leader of M2M manufacturing productivity solutions. Its connectivity technologies bridge the shop floor to the top floor and provide machine efficiencies, maintenance savings, and eradicate productivity gaps.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of Manufacturing AUTOMATION

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