In an age of data—and we certainly live in one of those—backups are paramount. Considering that nearly everything you do in a business is recorded in some way, be it from something as simple as an email to more official duties such as workflow documentation, order entry, scheduling, and shipping, data is the ultimate result of all this activity. And nowhere is data more prevalent than in manufacturing machinery, where every action done to these machines or by them is recorded in some way.
Losing any of this data can be not only detrimental to production; it can be devastating to the business as a whole. Discovering too late that you don’t have backup data from a critical system happens all too often for too many manufacturers.
To address this issue for CNC machine tools, Mitsubishi Electric Automation has begun offering its customers remote access to a backup of their CNC machine tool information. The new service reportedly includes the creation and maintenance of a “comprehensive set of backups of a manufacturer’s CNC machine tool data stored in a secure, remote location that can be accessed 24/7.”
“This service will be especially useful for those in the machining, drilling, aerospace, automotive, electronics and medical device industries, as well as for job shops and general manufacturing,” says Derrick Jordan, technical support engineer, Mitsubishi Electric Automation.
To help understand the need for CNC backup, consider what happens when downtime, either planned or unplanned, occurs. Without a data backup, a service engineer must research what data should be in the CNC machine, then reprogram it and reset the parameters. Mitsubishi Electric Automation contends that a remote backup of the CNC data could “eliminate this time-consuming process, and potentially prevent a service call altogether.”
Depending on the complexity of the data in the CNC machine, service engineers at Mitsubishi Electric Automation estimate that remote CNC data backups can save companies anywhere from a few hours to a day or more per occurrence of routine maintenance or machine downtime.
The cost of the backup service is $125.00 per backup, per machine.
To help determine the value of this service for your operation, Mitsubishi Electric Automation suggests the use of its downtime cost estimator, which can be downloaded from this page.
