ENGEL e-factory Takes Injection Molding Productivity to a Higher Level

Improving efficiencies, reducing costs and enhancing service are among the benefits of ENGEL e-factory, a modular software solution for the central acquisition of operation and process data as well as the setting data to ENGEL injection molding machines.

ENGEL e-factory serves as the interface and the communication gateway between injection molding production and an organization’s network. Integrating this information allows companies to make smarter and faster decisions about machine usage.

ENGEL e-factory lets you transfer, visualize, evaluate and administer all mold setting data (set values) as well as process actual values and operational data from the production stations.  This allows for further processing in the central databases of the organization’s network (such as for production parameter documentation).  What that ultimately means is shorter set-up times, reduced downtime, process improvements, and access to information for more efficient machine and personnel planning.

The integration of the machines with ENGEL e-factory also enhances service support. Using e-factory.Support allows ENGEL customer service to transfer all relevant data online to and from the machine – providing a direct on-site connection to the service engineers in ENGEL subsidiaries and experts in ENGEL production plants.  If an organization manufactures at more than one site, ENGEL e-factory.Support can also be used as an efficient internal communications platform for service and maintenance, supporting the experience and information exchange between the individual production sites.

“Molders will be increasingly forced by their internal or external customers to carry out their production with methods from the so called ‘Digital Factory’,” said Steve Braig, president & CEO of ENGEL North America.  “The goal for e-factory is to completely illustrate universal product development, production planning and production technical information.  Using e-factory, companies can integrate and simulate operations in order to optimize and to continuously improve the entire manufacturing chain.”

How e-factory can help

ENGEL e-factory helps take productivity to a higher level in a number of ways, including:
• Documented quality of produced parts through simply monitoring quality-defining parameters
• Fast and secure archiving of data as verification for the reproduced quality according to ISO 9001
• Direct availability of the setting and actual conditions of the machines at any monitor inside and outside of the company (remote monitoring)
• Visualization of the data in real-time as a graph or table
• Alarm notification with cause analysis and remote maintenance
• Interface between production and ERP Systems (Enterprise Resource Planning)
• Shorter set up times since the parameters can be loaded directly from the host computer
• Secure data – since manual transfer of data is not applicable
• Process improvement through documented and traceable changes
• Collection and retention of “know-how” through the configuration of databases

e-factory is another example of ENGEL delivering added value to help customers get the most from their injection molding machines.