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MEMEX - DAVID MCPHAIL CEO - SNNLive Interview

MEMEX Recognized as one of the Strongest Performing Companies on the TSX Venture Exchange

BURLINGTON, ON–(Marketwired – Feb 23, 2017) – Memex Inc. (“MEMEX” or the “Company”) (TSX VENTURE: OEE) announces today that it was recognized as a 2017 TSX Venture 50 Company. The TSX Venture 50™ are the 50 strongest performing companies (out of 1,643 listings) on the TSX Venture Exchange.

Memex was ranked 4th in the Technology category (out of 131 listings) based on a ranking formula which equally weights market cap, trading volume, and share price. To commemorate this achievement, CEO David McPhail will join other TSX Venture 50 representatives at a market opening ceremony on Friday, February 24th, 2017.

“It is an honour to be selected as one of the leading technology companies for the TSX Venture 50,” said David McPhail. “The award is a testament to our corporate vision, innovative product offerings, and execution in the growing Industrial Internet of Things market. We are well positioned in IIoT and are excited about our growth opportunity in 2017 and beyond. This achievement was made possible through the continued support and confidence MEMEX received from its employees, shareholders, customers, and other business partners.”

About TSX Venture 50:

The TSX Venture 50 is an annual ranking by the TMX Group of 50 upcoming companies on the TSX Venture Exchange. The list is determined by assigning equal weighting to share price appreciation, trading volume, and market capitalization growth. The companies in the list have results in key measures of market performance.

About MEMEX:

MEMEX was founded with a vision to improve the way automated machine and production equipment work and connect on the factory floor. Since then MEMEX has proved itself a pioneer in IIoT time and again. The company is committed to its mission of “successfully transforming factories of today into factories of the future” and envisions converting every machine into a node on the corporate network, creating visibility from shop-floor-to-top-floor. MEMEX is the developer of MERLIN, an award-winning IIoT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in Real-Time. MEMEX’s software and hardware IIoT solution enable customers to achieve tangible IIoT-centric business outcomes. The MERLIN software suite and connectivity products has enabled manufacturers to achieve upwards of a 50% increase in productivity and a 20%-plus increase in profit, on average. Additionally, customers have secured payback in less than four months, which equates to an Internal Rate of Return greater than 300 per cent.

Media Contacts

Memex Inc.: David McPhail, CEO

Phone: 519-993-1114

Email: david.mcphail@MemexOEE.com

 

Rashi Rathore, Marketing Manager

Phone: 905-635-3040 ext 103

Email: Rashi.Rathore@MemexOEE.com

 

Investor Relations

Sean Peasgood, Investor Relations

Phone: 416-565-2805

Email: Sean@SophicCapital.com

MEMEX - Manufacturing Productivity

MEMEX Inc. announces MERLIN Tempus™ and MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition Available for First Customer Ship (FCS)

Customer Beta Trial Feedback is Encouraging

BURLINGTON, ON–(Marketwired – Feb 21, 2017) – Memex Inc. (“MEMEX”) (TSX VENTURE: OEE) is pleased to announce the official release of MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition (EE), the next generation of our award-winning MERLIN Manufacturing Execution System software platforms.

Dave McPhail, President and CEO of MEMEX Inc., stated, “Following our Tempus debut at IMTS last September, we received significant interest in the platform’s next-generation, machine monitoring / analytics capabilities. Several of these inquiries led to beta tests with a number of clients and prospects, and their feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

With MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus EE, MEMEX is again redefining what it means to truly know what is happening in your manufacturing operations, regardless of industry vertical served. MEMEX has long been recognized as the leader in both shop floor monitoring, as well as providing MTConnect software and hardware solutions for any piece of manufacturing equipment on the plant floor. These new products will further differentiate MEMEX from the competition.

MEMEX’s entirely new software and hardware platforms build upon the success of the current award-winning MERLIN software suite and connectivity products, which has enabled manufacturers to achieve upwards of a 50% increase in productivity, a 20% plus increase in profit on just a 10% increase in OEE and payback in less than four months, which all equates to an Internal Rate of Return greater than 300%.”

About MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition:

MERLIN Tempus is an open and extensible Manufacturing Execution System (MES) platform that offers the next generation of tools and a dynamic configurable dashboard that provides a complete customizable view of shop floor operations. Tempus is Latin for time. MERLIN Tempus measures and analyzes manufacturing time. MERLIN Tempus tells manufacturers exactly how time is being used on their shop floors, with operators, with sensors and with any type of manufacturing asset. Developed using state-of-the-art software engineering technologies, including .NET and RESTful API’s, MERLIN Tempus delivers green-light metrics and analytical capabilities to effectively reduce downtime while increasing throughput and profits. MERLIN Tempus EE extends the capabilities of the MERLIN Tempus platform with full Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and integrated job scheduling. MERLIN Tempus supports MTConnect, Fanuc Focas, Fanuc I/O link to MTConnect®, OPC and other software protocols.

MERLIN Tempus and MERLIN Tempus EE are highly scalable, extensible and are open Manufacturing Execution System platforms. This is significant because it greatly simplifies and truly enables customers and partners to build upon the countless features and services MERLIN Tempus has to offer.

About MEMEX:

MEMEX, the developer of MERLIN, an award winning IIoT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in Real-Time, is the global leader in machine to machine connectivity solutions. Committed to its mission of “Successfully transforming factories of today into factories of the future” and encouraged by the accelerating adoption and success of MERLIN, MEMEX is relentlessly pursuing the development of increasingly innovative solutions suitable in the IIoT era. MEMEX envisions converting every machine into a node on corporate networks, thereby, creating visibility from shop-floor-to-top-floor. MEMEX, with its deep commitment towards machine connectivity, offers solutions that are focused on finding hidden capacity by measuring and managing Real-Time data. This empowers MEMEX’s customers to effectively quantify and manage OEE, reduce costs and incorporate strategies for continuous lean improvement.

Media Contacts

David McPhail
CEO
Phone: 519-993-1114
Email: david.mcphail@memexoee.com

Rashi Rathore
Marketing Manager
Phone: 905-635-3040 ext 103
Email: Rashi.Rathore@memexoee.com

Investor Relations
Sean Peasgood
Investor Relations
Phone: 416-565-2805
Email: Sean@SophicCapital.com

 

MEMEX - Real-Time Data Visualization

OEE May Not Be Enough

Columns: 12/1/2016 | CONTRIBUTED BY DAVE EDSTROM ,Chief Technology Officer , Memex

Overall equipment efficiency (OEE) is a critical measurement of how well a manufacturing unit is doing. But shops should also focus on profitability, which is where Financial OEE comes in.

Overall equipment efficiency (OEE) is considered a critical measurement of how well a manufacturing unit is doing. The formula is simple: It multiplies the percentages of availability, performance and quality to yield a single percentage. This result enables similar units (one machine, one department, one plant or an entire enterprise) to be compared or rated against a target such as a plant’s best record or a benchmark of world-class performance. Focusing on OEE enables manufacturers to pinpoint factors that hold back productivity.

Significantly, recent developments in data-driven manufacturing make calculating OEE easier, faster and more accurate—and acting on it more effective. For example, these benefits are an important advantage of connecting machine tools to a network for data collection and monitoring.

However, shops and plants must also focus on profitability. Managers have to balance decisions about maximizing the part-making capability of their equipment with decisions about the money-making potential of this equipment. OEE ratings alone provide an incomplete picture. One development that seeks to address this shortcoming is called Financial OEE (FOEE), a trademarked name for a new feature of MERLIN Tempus Enterprise Edition (EE) from Memex.

MERLIN (Manufacturing Enterprise Real-time Lean Information Network) is a communications platform for real-time manufacturing analytics. Tempus is the company’s suite of applications for machine monitoring such as real-time views of the plant floor, custom dashboards, reporting, alerting and other functions related to data-driven manufacturing. Tempus EE adds OEE, job scheduling and other modules such as FOEE.

Memex has partnered with noted OEE expert and author Robert Hansen to develop this approach. FOEE answers the question, “What is the value of improving OEE on this particular machine for this particular product?” More to the point, it answers “How much profit is being left on the table by not performing at company-best or industry-best levels for that specific part?”  Thus, the FOEE concept shows the power of data-driven manufacturing and the Industrial Internet of Things to transform decision-making not only on the shop floor, but also in the front office.

Tempus EE automatically collects the event details necessary to compute OEE.  The first phase of FOEE applies to stand-alone machines making a finished product. FOEE requires three key financial input values for each product and the machine. These inputs are unit sales price, unit material cost and the hourly operational expense (OPEX) of the machine. This information can be derived from the ERP product standard and the income statement.

FOEE is the current-state hourly profit divided by a value representing a world-class level of profit. This ratio tells a company what profit it made compared to what profit could have been made at world-class levels. With this information, a company can see the financial value of improving the machine’s performance.

In the figure on page 40, a product called P0006 is analyzed over 180 days. The product-run OEE data is correlated with the three inputs necessary for FOEE. It also associates important actionable data such as profit contribution per hour and current FOEE based on the machine’s best FOEE percentage, as well as how much more profit would accrue by running the machine at its best OEE rate.

With FOEE, managers can look at jobs scheduled for a machine and make decisions based not just on utilization, but also on utilization and profit. This enables managers to compare a list of machines capable of running a certain job, and to determine which machine would yield the highest hourly profit. Just as the OEE figure related to each project or job is a key tool in prioritizing and evaluating continuous improvement projects, FOEE provides a quick view of the profitability opportunity for these projects. FOEE is a tool to make better business decisions for scheduling products, guiding continuous improvement efforts and giving important feedback to sales and marketing teams.

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MEMEX - DAVID MCPHAIL CEO interviewed

“Our Product Generates Over 300% IRR,” Says Memex’s CEO

Memex’s Merlin platform measures overall equipment effectiveness

SmallCapPower was at the Canadian Innovation Exchange’s Public Investor Day in November and had an exclusive chat with David McPhail, President and CEO of Memex Inc. (CVE:OEE). The Company’s main product, Merlin, is both a software and hardware platform product that uses three metrics to calculate overall equipment effectiveness (hence their stock symbol) and generates nearly 50% productivity improvement. Find out how Merlin helps to generate over 300% internal return rate of capital, and OEE’s plans to solidify its position as a market leader in North America.

 

Click here to watch the video interview 

MEMEX - IIoT

The IIoT or Industry 4.0: Who will win?

Written by Dave Edstrom & David McPhail, Memex | Tuesday October 11, 2016
Oct. 11, 2016 – At Memex, we are frequently asked questions about both the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0. The questions usually start off, “What do you see happening in [IIoT/Industry 4.0]?” The conversation will quickly zero in on their real concern, which is to find an answer to the question: “What and when should I be doing something with [IIoT/Industry 4.0]?”
Conceptually, are either IIoT or Industry 4.0 really new in manufacturing? The answer to that question is an emphatic “no.” One only needs to go back 36 years to the Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) effort led by GM to see just one standardization attempt applied to manufacturing. For either to be successful, they must provide a net bottom line benefit for the dollars invested by delivering tangible and measurable business outcome(s).At Memex, we would argue what is changing even faster is that manufacturing is catching up, and even surpassing, other industries in truly understanding what is happening on the plant floor. Only two to four per cent of all shops or plants are monitored, a fact Dave Edstrom, Memex CTO, picked up when surveying the industry during his time as president and chairman of the board of the MTConnect Institute. When asked, most plant or shop managers will state their plant utilization is in the 65 to 75 per cent range. When hardware/software is deployed that can properly quantify this number, it is shown time and again to be actually 25 to 32 per cent. A significant inflection point for both IIoT and Industry 4.0 is MTConnect. A fact that cannot be overstated is that the open and royalty-free manufacturing interconnectivity standard MTConnect has been a huge enabler for manufacturing and provides the viable highway for information sharing from the shop floor to the top floor.

The evolution
Industry 4.0 first came to life in 2011. The name Industry 4.0 represents the fourth industrial revolution, with steam power being the first, mass production using electricity being the second, and digital computing being the third revolution for improving manufacturing. It is interesting to note in 1966, Karl Steinbuch, a German computer scientist, stated, “In a few decades’ time, computers will be interwoven into almost every industrial product.”

Industry 4.0 recognizes there are significant technical challenges that all come into play and the only way to address those are with a comprehensive framework. A key paper for Industry 4.0 is the Working Paper No. 01/2015, titled Design Principles for Industrie 4.0 Scenarios: A Literature Review by Mario Hermann, Tobias Pentek, and Boris Otto. In this paper, they bring out key design principles for Industry 4.0:

• Interoperability
• Virtualization
• Decentralization
• Real-time capability
• Service orientation
• Modularity

Interoperability is listed as the first design principle and this is where a standard, such as MTConnect, becomes critically important. While MTConnect is not yet part of Industry 4.0, there are conversations going on at very high levels. This fact was stated by Prof. Dr.- Ing. Dr. h.c. Detlef Zühlke when he sat on an Industry 4.0 panel with Dave Edstrom, Memex CTO, at McMaster University this past April.

GE is credited with coining the term IIoT, while Cisco is credited with coining the term IoT. By adding Industrial to Internet of Things, how does GE differentiate the two? We find the following on the GE Digital blog: “In today’s ever-changing and volatile market, manufacturers seek a single version of the truth that will help them make the right decisions for improving profitability, while at the same time mitigating risk as much as possible. They wish to grow their profits and their organization, while ensuring safety for employees, the general public and the environment. To obtain all of this, they need increased visibility and better insights into the performance of their equipment and assets.”

GE is positioning IIoT brilliantly in its commercials. In one, “Owen” is given a hammer by his father and is told it was his grandfathers. Owen’s father asks Owen to pick it up. Owen tells his parents that while GE builds industrial equipment, he will be writing software that will allow machines to speak to each other. These commercials are laying the groundwork for data-driven manufacturing.

Taking advantage of the platform
Now that we have provided the definitions directly from the sources and the relevant context, let’s look at how we would respond to the next question, “What does Memex see happening in [IIoT/Industry 4.0]?” For many, IIoT means that after a plant has attached all of their manufacturing equipment, they come to the conclusion that data analysis begets more data analysis and they want to start adding sensors — everywhere. These sensors include coolant, vibration, temperature, humidity, motion, current and amperage, to name just a few. These sensors come into play after shops have electronically connected to their major assets, such as machine tools and operators. This attention on connecting everything in manufacturing underscores the importance of interoperability, the first design principle of Industry 4.0.

What both of these efforts are trying to establish is to be the platform for manufacturing. What is a platform? Microsoft Windows, Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Apple’s OS X are all examples of platforms. A platform is not just the operating system, but it is also the rules of the road in terms of interoperability between systems, security, licensing, interfaces, reference implementations, working groups and countless other critical aspects of a platform. Building a platform that becomes an industry standard is extremely difficult and expensive.

What should a shop owner or plant manager being doing today with either IIoT or Industry 4.0?

The tremendous interest in both Industry 4.0 and IIoT are proving the point that many of us in manufacturing have known for years manufacturing is ripe for analytics. Both Industry 4.0 and IIoT fall into the data-driven manufacturing camp. Woody Allen once said, “If you live in a country run by a committee, make sure you are on the committee.” Your level of involvement today with these efforts should directly reflect the possible outcomes and the tangible net business benefits to your business. If you are running a large plant with many software developers, you might want to invest some of a software developer’s time into either investigating these efforts or possibly joining Industry 4.0.

What steps should a plant manager take with either IIoT or Industry 4.0?

• Realize these efforts are a means to an end, not an end in itself.
• The bottom line with any effort in manufacturing should answer the fundamental question, “How does this help me improve my efficiency so I can make more parts and more profits with less resources in less time?”
• Far and away, the best investment of time is to truly understand what is happening on your plant floor. The way to accomplish this is with a shop floor monitoring system. The ROI of shop floor monitoring is measured in weeks and months, delivering an average of 300 per cent Internal Return Rate of capital — the percentage is based on the information we track from our customers.
• When it comes time to connect your assets on your shop floor, use MTConnect as the interconnectivity standard.
• If you are one of the less than five per cent who have completely connected your plant floor and can see exactly what is happening on any given manufacturing asset at anytime and from anywhere, then you should start looking into where it makes sense to work with Industry 4.0.

In our opinion, IIoT for manufacturing is really about adding sensors to manufacturing and the basic challenge is interoperability; interoperability is always the challenge in computers.

Will IIoT or Industry 4.0 be the MAP of the 21st century and end up in the graveyard of industrial standards initiatives that promised much but didn’t deliver, or will both truly be worthy of the term “revolution?” Only time will tell, but our bet is it doesn’t matter what you call it, if you are not connecting your plant’s assets to be monitored, then it is not if you will go out of business, but when.

David McPhail is the CEO and president of Memex, and a current member of Manufacturing AUTOMATION’s editorial advisory board. He has chaired several working groups of U.S.-based MTConnect Institute. Dave Edstrom is the CTO for Memex, as well as the former president and chairman of the board for the MTConnect Institute. Based in Burlington, Ont., Memex is the global leader of M2M manufacturing productivity solutions. Its connectivity technologies bridge the shop floor to the top floor and provide machine efficiencies, maintenance savings, and eradicate productivity gaps.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of Manufacturing AUTOMATION

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