The ever-increasing emphasis on product quality with increased productivity has been driving the automotive manufacturing industry to find new ways to produce high quality products without increasing production time and manufacturing costs. In addition, automotive manufacturing plants are implementing flexible manufacturing strategies with computer numerical control (CNC) machining centers to address excess capacity, shifting consumer trends and future volume uncertainty of products. Over time, plants have used several preventative and predictive maintenance methods to address machine reliability. Such systems include, but are not limited to, scheduling machine down times at regular intervals to check/replace bearings and other spindle/slide components before they can have an adverse affect on part quality. However, most of these methods and traditional systems are not cost effective and cause significant machine down-times, safety concerns and labor overheads and do not reliably monitor other process issues, such as, clamping, incoming stock variations and thermal phenomena.
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