The UNITED GRINDING Group's customers are as diverse as the group itself. They range from small businesses to large corporations, from single to mass production, and from the automotive industry to aerospace, tool and die, and precision mechanics. For the manufacturing of complex and sophisticated parts, not only the Group's grinding, eroding, or measuring machines are used, but also other technologies and therefore machines from third-party manufacturers, such as milling machines or lathes. Aggregating valuable data from this heterogeneous machine park to optimise production can be cumbersome and time-consuming. However, this has been made easy with umati (universal machine technology interface), which has become the global interface standard for machine tools.

The simple networking of various machines from different manufacturers and ages was demonstrated in production at STUDER, the group's cylindrical grinding machine specialist. In addition to STUDER's cylindrical grinding machines, machine tools from DMG Mori and WALDRICH COBURG were networked using umati. The data was then merged into the Production Monitor of UNITED GRINDING Digital Solutions™. The interlinking has shown that umati can not only be used for new machines, but also older existing machines can be networked without any problems.

Christian Josi, Head- Digital Engineering, UNITED GRINDING Group, explains "We were able to show how easy it is to network older machines using umati. The fact that new machines can easily exchange data and forward it to our Production Monitor thanks to umati is well known and has proven itself. The integration of older existing machines, which are more than 15 years old, had not previously been realised at the UNITED GRINDING Group using umati.” 

The WALDRICH COBURG machine has been in production at STUDER for over a decade and is predestined for this project. An exciting project for an apprentice, Josi thought. He immediately received support from Marc Baumgartner, who is responsible for training automation technician apprentices at STUDER. Christian Breitenbaumer (4th-year automation technician apprentice at STUDER) then took on the task, analysed the structure, functionality, and electrical diagram of the WALDRICH machine, and provided support in evaluating a suitable, umati-compatible and cost-effective IoT device for interface communication. This was wired and parameterised by him.

Integration into the Production Monitor was then just a formality - thanks to umati. The key productivity figures of the WALDRICH COBURG machine, together with the data from the other production systems at STUDER, can now be displayed in real-time on the shop floor dashboard, the PC, or even on a smartphone using the Digital Solutions mobile app.

The UNITED GRINDING Group is an active member of the umati core group and is helping to develop the global communication standard for machine tools.