ZEISS following trend towards automation in Industry 4.0 with new software

By Niraj M Wanikar, Chief Editor, CNCTimes.com, 2016-04-29 15:05:00

Industry 4.0 will only succeed if manufacturing companies continuously capture and evaluate their quality, machine and production process data and use these data to improve their entire processes. ZEISS is contributing to the accompanying paradigm shift in the measuring process by continuously enhancing its computing software solutions. ZEISS will present new approaches and enhanced software packages at the Control trade fair in Stuttgart, 26-29 April.
"The measuring process is increasingly the base for steering all manufacturing," says Dr. Hubert Lettenbauer, Head of Software Development at the ZEISS Industrial Metrology business group. As in every Industry 4.0 scenario, software is increasingly becoming the main focus. For some time, ZEISS has been creating increasingly intelligent measuring and evaluation software from one release to the next. For Lettenbauer, the goal is clear: "We want to achieve the greatest possible automation of the entire measuring process to increase our customers' efficiency, to improve the reproducibility of measurements and to minimize operator influence."
With software developments and new features for ZEISS PiWeb, ZEISS CALYPSO and ZEISS CALIGO, ZEISS is focusing on the increasing automation in industry. That is why ZEISS started to systematically evolve the ZEISS PiWeb process analysis tool, enabling companies to merge a multitude of measuring and inspection data from different sources and detect problems more quickly by using comprehensive evaluation possibilities. All measuring machines from ZEISS now come standard with the reporting functionality of this process analysis software. In the next stage, the focus will be on software which combs through the large quantity of available measurement and test data automatically looking for relevant correlations and then presents these in a user-friendly manner. "This is no easy task, but that's what will make ZEISS PiWeb a holistic evaluation and steering software solution," says Lettenbauer.
ZEISS CALYPSO also promises to increase efficiency. Lettenbauer explains: "These days companies find themselves in an Industry 4.0 world. Everyone's talking about the function for importing PMI (product manufacturing information), and this is where ZEISS CALYPSO comes into play." To take one example: by using this module, CAD metadata – the so-called PMI data – can be transferred easily and largely automatically in the form of dimensions and tolerances and evaluated intelligently. This means that test plans can be generated far more quickly by using 3D models.
With ZEISS CALYPSO 2016 – a release that will be launched at Control – ZEISS is setting new standards so that metrology engineers can, under ideal conditions, reduce the time spent generating measurement plans by up to 80 percent. ZEISS CALYPSO means more convenient user guidance, even for PMI data. Now metrology engineers can easily filter by groups and characteristics, sort them and, with just a few clicks, transfer the relevant information to the test plan. In spite of these considerable savings, ZEISS is already thinking about further evolving the software so that, in the future, it generates test plans independently and completely automatically by using the metadata saved in the existing CAD models. This goal is still a ways off, but as Lettenbauer says: "The trend is clearly towards greater automation and, consequently, preventing human transfer errors."

http://www.zeiss.com/corporate/en_de/zeiss-corporate-newsroom/press-releases.html?id=Automation

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