Gleason recently joined the Umati Community to develop a common, inter-company, inter-process, inter-model standard which enables production assets to communicate directly regarding production and process data, building a base for advanced diagnostics and efficiency optimization regarding products and processes, and ultimately, the Smart Factory. 

Umati with its unified interface will enable customers to overcome current restrictions, choosing equipment more freely, connecting assets than never experienced before. For manufacturers, integration of third party services like automation, tooling or software apps will become much easier. Step by step, initiatives like Umati can be expanded to the entire mechanical engineering industry, not single parts of the manufacturing machine.

Eventually, all elements of the production chain must connect to really optimize processes, maximize product quality, avoid scrap, and gain the best possible efficiency. This initiative goes hand in hand with Gleason’s own Closed Loop automatic correction cycle, supported by in-process inspection in parallel to the actual manufacturing cycle.