Standardized measuring and test equipment interface

Today, dig­i­tal data exchange between depart­ments makes a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to accel­er­at­ing and safe­guard­ing work process­es in a man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny. COSCOM is expand­ing its ECO sys­tem in the area of resource man­age­ment to include a stan­dard­ized data exchange option to CAQ sys­tems that com­plies with VDI Guide­line 2623. This allows new data net­work­ing strate­gies to be imple­ment­ed with­in the val­ue-added process that are more reli­able and faster.

Extended Shopfloor Platform

COSCOM, an IT plat­form spe­cial­ist in machin­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing, con­sid­ers mea­sur­ing and test­ing equip­ment to be oper­at­ing equip­ment in the machin­ing process in the same way as, for exam­ple, milling and turn­ing tools. There­fore, mea­sur­ing and test­ing equip­ment must also be avail­able at the appro­pri­ate points from the begin­ning of a pro­duc­tion order. How­ev­er, con­ven­tion­al tool man­age­ment sys­tems often con­sid­er only the CAD/CAM envi­ron­ment or tool pre­set­ting to be rel­e­vant with regard to data net­work­ing. The COSCOM ECO sys­tem, on the oth­er hand, con­sid­ers the com­plete pro­vi­sion of oper­at­ing resources, which means that the qual­i­ty assur­ance process­es in pro­duc­tion are also includ­ed. There­fore, it was the log­i­cal con­se­quence to inte­grate the oper­a­tional QA sys­tems with a stan­dard­ized data inter­face into the COSCOM store floor plat­form so that data exchange can func­tion smooth­ly and, above all, in a stan­dard­ized manner. 

Facilitated data exchange in gauge management

In order not to gen­er­ate time-con­sum­ing, indi­vid­ual solu­tions in the com­pa­nies, it was impor­tant to the com­pa­ny’s devel­op­ment depart­ment to estab­lish a gen­er­al­ly valid stan­dard. The new guide­line VDI/VDE 2623 facil­i­tates data exchange in gauge man­age­ment by defin­ing a uni­form data for­mat. With­out this stan­dard data for­mat, the required data from dif­fer­ent sys­tems arrive in the cus­tomer’s sys­tem in a wide vari­ety of for­mats, thus caus­ing the often time-con­sum­ing and error-prone indi­vid­ual cus­tomer solutions.

The VDI has there­fore defined a stan­dard for­mat for the exchange of data in gauge man­age­ment in Guide­line 2623. Accord­ing to this guide­line, the Cal­i­bra­tion Data Exchange data for­mat (CDE data for­mat) must be used. This means that in the future it will also be pos­si­ble to exchange test equip­ment data between dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions and data­bas­es using Inter­net-based tech­nolo­gies. With the appli­ca­tion of this guide­line, a reli­able and fast exchange of test equip­ment data between dif­fer­ent sys­tems, such as depart­ments, com­pa­nies or plants, is guar­an­teed. The require­ment of the VDI/VDE guide­line 2623 has now been estab­lished in the sys­tem in the form of a stan­dard interface.

COSCOM standard interface integrates QA systems

With this new mea­sure­ment and test equip­ment inter­face, QA sys­tems can now also be direct­ly inte­grat­ed via their test plan as demand gen­er­a­tors for COSCOM resource sched­ul­ing. The avail­abil­i­ty at a planned point in time, the cur­rent stor­age loca­tion as well as the cal­i­bra­tion due dates of mea­sur­ing and test equip­ment are thus guar­an­teed and essen­tial fac­tors of a suc­cess­ful pro­vi­sion­ing process.

The exten­sion of the sys­tem accord­ing to guide­line 2623 has already proven itself in prac­tice at the begin­ning. Sev­er­al project imple­men­ta­tions with dif­fer­ent QA sys­tem part­ners have already been suc­cess­ful­ly realized.