In addition to providing technical support for E2, we have years of IT experience in machine shops and other production environments working on the pc side of machines like Anca, Haas and Vollmer, CMM/metrology equipment like Brown & Sharpe and Mitutoyo, and with CAD/CAM software such as AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and GibbsCAM.
If you've got a CNC or EDM machine, chances are there's a computer connected to it. And it's a pretty safe bet that it's old, gets no maintenance, doesn't get backed up, and is probably full of chips, oil or coolant. Machine shops are among the worst possible environments for a computer and it's just a matter of time until it fails.
If that's the case in your shop, you're one power outage away from possibly losing all the programs you've written and the time it took to write them. If that computer fails, you'll not only have employees with no machine to run, but an expensive machine that's not making parts.
You can easily avoid this disaster with just a few simple steps:
Especially if your equipment is older, it may be difficult to find a new pc that will run your version of the software.
Just like your CNC or EDM machines, your CMM or other metrology tools probably have a computer attached to them. They're probably not on the shop floor, but they're still just computers that are going to break eventually. You can take the same precautions now and lessen the impact when one of your machines fails.
If you're still depending on a dot-matrix printer for your reports we'll help you get the machines networked so you can redirect the reports to a shared folder, convert them to a format your customer can use, and eliminate the expense and hassle of mailing and storage.