Ramen for your Manufacturing Plant Upgrade

Hypertherm leverages Ramen’s Wireless Network as a Service on their path to liberating data locked in their machines

Hypertherm is the world’s leader in plasma cutting technology and wants to continue to lead. When Hypertherm management embarked on the path to making their factories in North America smarter, they decided they must overhaul the network supporting their manufacturing plant. They goals were faster troubleshooting, enhanced productivity, lower operating costs, increased throughput, reduced bottlenecks, optimized machine efficiency to meet production needs, and minimization of unplanned downtime. They started by systematically evaluated a range of wireless technologies and concluded that no single wireless technology was the magic bullet. They partnered with Ramen Inc, to develop an industry leading architecture. Each Hypertherm machining station connects to a Ramen Machine Gateway (RMG) that automatically picks the write networking technology for each category of data and enterprise application. The Ramen provided network also enables the Hypertherm manufacturing team to add remove devices from the network based on predefined policies and categories.

Executive Summary

Hypertherm is an industry leader in their targeted product space of industrial cutting. They manufacture plasma cutting machines, torches and consumables in their North American factories. At the Lebanon manufacturing plant, they have sophisticated machining stations, assembly stations and test and packaging stations for the plasma cutting nozzles that are produced in high volume. Hypertherm collects a lot of data per part manufactured but this data was getting marooned in each machine. They partnered with Ramen to create a unique networking solution tailored to their specific objectives.  Each machine is connected to a Ramen Machine Gateway (RMG) which can send data over Ethernet, WiFi, private cellular as well as mm-wave. The RMG acts as a smart gateway that can route data over Ethernet, WiFi, Cellular or mm-wave to best meet the reliability, bandwidth and data needs of the specific application.

Highlights

By leveraging the RMG technology and Ramen’s multi-technology wireless network, Hypertherm was able to move all relevant data that had previously been marooned on the machine to the cloud where it could be analyzed using the latest AI tools to improve quality. Ramen also enabled remote access to several PLC subsystems that previously could only be accessed by going to the machine and physically connecting a debug cable to it. The Ramen provided network also enabled the Hypertherm manufacturing staff to add new devices to the manufacturing operations network and remove devices – something that previously required creating of a ticket for the IT team and would take several days.

Challenge

When Hypertherm decided to upgrade their manufacturing network, they found that no single wireless technology could meet all their needs. Private Cellular could provide high reliability but could not provide the bandwidth/latency required to support the HD cameras that monitor some of the assembly steps in their manufacturing process. High bandwidth images documenting the highly specialized machining steps were getting marooned on the machines and would sometimes get lost. By partnering with Ramen, they were able to get a multi-technology network operational which was able to meet all their needs.

Solution

For Hypertherm, Ramen provides a highly tuned multi-technology network that is completely cloud managed and has a self-service portal that empowers the manufacturing staff to move machines around without networking changes becoming a bottleneck to slow down their operations.

A cloud connection to the Ramen Cloud Management system facilitates remote network monitoring and enables seamless software upgrades. The Ramen deployed wireless network works their Cisco-based enterprise Ethernet backbone.

Impact

By partnering with Ramen, Hypertherm is on track to upgrade their manufacturing plant to a smart manufacturing plant where the production process is carefully tracked every step of the way and the full power of modern analytics and machine learning can be brought to bear on their whole manufacturing process.

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