Fair Friend Group (FFG) was established in 1979 and strives for excellence with the founding principles of reliability, growth, continuous advancement, and highest quality standards. FFG has 95 companies scattered in 10 major countries. FFG consists of three major divisions of businesses: (1) Machine Tool Division, (2) Industry Equipment Division, and (3) Green Energy Division.
The FFG entities in Taiwan unite 6 major brands ( FEELER, LEADWELL, SANCO, ECOCA, EQUIPTOP, TSEMC) from machine tool industry and these brands have substantially contributed to the progress in industrial manufacturing, which are focusing on customer needs and applying their special expertise in milling, turning, grinding and 3D metal printing manufacturing.
What expectations do you have of umati, what do you expect from the partnership?
Participating in UMATI initiative has provided a great opportunity for FFG to create competitive advantage, connecting the high-level IT system in production environments with a standardized machine-to-machine connection methodology based on the open communication standard OPC-UA, which is critical technology to helping to bring major advancements to the smart factory, enable manufacturing to be more flexible. We are expecting the extended support from UMATI, to define new information models on innovative applications in manufacturing industry, such as 3D metal printing.
What advantages does umati offer your company and your customers?
The vision of FFG is to leverage the large potential added value of manufacturing data, information and knowledge in a factory-centered way to achieve smart manufacturing empowerment, resulting in higher integration capability and increased factory productivity. While the primary use of UMATI is to simplify the connection between machine tools and external IT systems, the main benefit consists of making data processing easier. If data are standardized on many machine tool interfaces, the processing and analyzing of these data will be faster and easier.
How do you evaluate the expansion of the umati initiative to the entire mechanical engineering industry?
Nowadays the manufacturing products in the market are characterized by small batches and multiple varieties, and the innovative application like 3D metal printing. Therefore, the production‐line should reconfigure its process paths and recombine manufacturing units dynamically. Standardized, open, flexible and secure interface can be the enabler for a more flexible factory environment, allows for easier reconfiguration and moving of equipment. As a result, the reconfigurable production-line can generate a large range of different products due to its variability, scalability and schedulability, which is the basis of flexible manufacturing in smart factory.