This expands FFG’s presence throughout MAG’s tier suppliers and job shops supporting the medical, automotive, aerospace, industrial equipment, and renewable energy industries.

MAG, a leading manufacturer of horizontal milling and vertical turning machines and applied automation solutions, has announced that they are the exclusive importer of Fair Friend Group’s (FFG) FEELER and FFG DMC lines of machine tools throughout North America. MAG has been designing and building machine tools in Detroit, Michigan for over 120 years and is an award-winning machine tool partner throughout the international automotive and truck industries.  MAG joined as a member of FFG in 2015.

The FFG machine tool conglomerate is the world’s largest machine tool company consisting of 37 brands.  FFG offers the most comprehensive portfolio of vertical and horizontal machining centers, vertical and horizontal turning centers, multi-spindle and rotary transfer technology, gear manufacturing, grinders, and factory automation solutions. FFG’s global footprint includes 50 state-of-art manufacturing facilities in 10 countries. 

“We are very pleased to begin offering additional FFG machine brands and machining solutions to the North America market and supporting existing Feeler and FFG DMC users with service, replacement parts and applications support” says MAG President Brian Prina. Feeler and FFG DMC enables us to offer North American manufacturers a wider selection of precision machining solutions and will complement our existing high-performance MAG and SMS lines very well.

“We are excited to have MAG as the exclusive North American importer for Feeler and FFG DMC. Their excellent applications and automation expertise and customer service will expand the FFG presence throughout tier suppliers and job shops supporting the automotive and truck, aerospace, industrial equipment, medical, and renewable energy industries,” says FFG Chairman and CEO Jimmy Chu. “We are excited to see FFG companies coming together enabling the company to fully immerse itself in the market and tailor its machining technology to solve the unique challenges of its customers throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico.

MAG is offering Feeler Vertical Machining Centers, Horizontal Machining Centers, Horizontal Turning Centers, Double Column Bridge Mills, and FFG DMC Horizontal Turning Centers, Vertical Turning Centers, and Vertical Machining Centers.

Feeler and FFG DMC machines will be available at the MAG Sterling Heights, MI Technology Center and at MAG’s distributors located across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

While the orders decreased, the good news is January orders were also the strongest on record since USMTO began tracking orders.

Manufacturing technology orders totaled $436.6 million in January 2022, according to the latest U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) report published by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology.

Manufacturing technology orders totaled $436.6 million in January 2022, according to the latest U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders report published by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology. January 2022 orders decreased nearly 27% from December 2021 but increased 33% from January 2021. January orders were also the strongest on record since USMTO began tracking orders. 

“USMTO typically shows a drop in orders from December to January, and, after December 2021 proved to be the best month on record, we expected to see a substantial decrease,” says Douglas K. Woods, president of AMT. “Recording the best January on record is a welcome sign that the strength of the manufacturing technology market will continue into 2022. Recent demand for production capacity has shifted from sectors producing final consumer goods to ones closer to the raw material process.”

Strong consumer demand through January 2022 drove continued investments in manufacturing technology in all stages of the supply chain. In 2021, orders for manufacturing technology were increasing uniformly across all sectors; however, the largest growth was in those closest to the final product.

“Consumer demand necessitated elevated capital investment, but we are now seeing a shift to industrial demand,” Woods says. “This shift in industrial demand indicates that entire manufacturing supply chains are being brought back to the United States. Long term, the broad industrial base created by concentrated supply chains is a huge positive for the manufacturing technology industry and the economy as a whole.”

The market for manufacturing technology has proved resilient over the past several months despite several challenges facing manufacturers.

“We have been highlighting issues that could take the wind out of the sails for the past several months, but the industry has overcome them in one way or another,” Woods says. “Recent geopolitical events and sustained inflation are two more challenges, and time will tell if the industry can find a silver lining behind them.”

The medical device industry is poised to benefit from greater agility and long-term efficiency savings.

With the disruption of 2021 behind us, we can reflect on a year that brought a lot of ups and downs, creating uncertainty in countless industries across the globe. From this came new ways of working, which the medical device industry certainly did not escape. With regulations looming and the need to embrace disruptive new technologies, the medical device industry has been swamped with compliance deadlines and change – and this isn’t set to slow down anytime soon.

The EU IVDR deadline this year is slowly creeping up, due to be enforced from May 2022, and organizations will see a lot of pressure applied to staff and rising demand for advanced technology deployments to support the process of achieving compliance.

As digital transformation sweeps the medical device industry, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D rendering, and cloud systems are the frontrunning capabilities that look set to take the industry by storm, positioning themselves as valuable assets across global medical device operations.

1. AI taking the pressure off operations For some time now, the medical device industry has relied on manual work to carry out critical tasks such as label, artwork and asset management and associated end-to-end processes. This, however, is not sustainable for both optimizing operations and human error, nor is it keeping abreast with the digital transformation most industries are currently going through.

As the medical device industry looks for ways to modernize its operations, AI is the tech advancement the industry is increasingly turning towards for assistance. AI can significantly speed up formerly manual processes and alleviate the burden on the workforce, allowing them to re-focus and prioritize other business-critical work. With AI an excellent fit for process-oriented work, it has the ability to complete repetitive tasks with minimal errors – a key focus for medical device labeling.

For example, AI can identify label assets such as regulatory symbols and text and fill a spreadsheet with standardized data – a task that would take far longer and have an increased risk of mistakes if completed manually. Having such digital solutions that can alleviate the pressures of medical device labeling tasks, such as Veraciti, mean efficiency and productivity can be significantly increased. One multinational medical device company, for example, changed 90,000 labels in six months with only six people on the task. For reference, if there was no technology in use here, one million labels would take on average 300 million hours to manually change. The writing is clearly on the wall.

2. The medical device industry is going virtual Another emerging technology that I expect to see in increased usage throughout 2022 is 3D rendering – a software solution designed to take user-created 3D models and place them into fully-realized 3D environments or images. In the label and artwork space, 3D rendering can generate labels to put on the product and produce a 360-degree view of what it will look like on the bottle, product or even shelf before it goes to market. Traditionally, the software has mostly only been used in retail settings but recent interest from medical device companies has seen a major increase in requests by marketing teams within these organizations.

The request comes again from a timing perspective. With 3D rendering, marketing teams have more free time for downstream editing for different types of print press – rather than simply pulling in another person to do the job on their own. But similar to the AI story, 3D rendering will work best alongside human labor – simply relying on the computer alone will not be effective. For example, the artist will need to choose the best color for the materials, as well as define the correct lighting features to make the most realistic render possible.

Here at Kallik, we’ve been helping medical device customers with this process ourselves, but now we have the additional power of support from our new AI and 3D technology partners, integrating 3D modeling with the Kallik Veraciti platform.

3. Cloud-based solutions offer upgrades and reliability Last but not least, my third and final prediction is the further adoption of cloud-based technologies, where the stats really speak for themselves. Research by TechJury has suggested that by 2025, the global public cloud computing market will be worth over $800 billion, with over 70% of companies already using cloud set to increase their budgets in the upcoming years.

Here at Kallik, we have been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host our Veracti platform for 18 months. The benefits have been highly noticeable, so I’m not surprised to see that in 2020, more than 50% of enterprises moved their workloads to AWS. This was the largest enterprise public cloud adoption figure for the year, a trend that I don’t see changing in 2022. With old legacy systems, adding a new customer to the system would be slow – but as our customer base has continued to increase, the new platform hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down either. With enhanced reliability, using AWS has given us the ability to dramatically scale as a business, as well as our customers.

Cloud solutions offer automatic upgrades and reliability testing – which is exactly what AWS has been doing for Kallik and its customers. Now, with less time spent on manual upgrades, team members are able to focus on future technologies and prospects that will be critical for business operations in the upcoming years.

With a new year comes new possibilities As we start to progress through 2022, the clock is ticking on the EU IVDR compliance deadline, so it has never been more important for the medical device industry to be prepared to comply with new industry regulations. With a May deadline coming quicker than expected, the time has arrived to make the leap from manual processes to advanced technologies to enhance both compliance projects and long-term artwork and label management operations.

With technologies such as 3D modelling, cloud-based solutions, and AI now readily available, we should expect to see a rise in industry professionals using such advanced tech to enhance operations throughout 2022 and beyond. With targeted digital deployments throughout operations, the medical device industry is poised to benefit from greater agility and long-term efficiency savings.

The software as a service Optimal Product Usability Suite offering supports the development of safe and effective medical products and technologies.

Emergo by UL, a global medical device and healthcare technology consultancy, has launched a web-based platform, Optimal Product Usability Suite (OPUS). This software as a service (SaaS) offering provides medical device and technology manufacturers with efficient access to human factors engineering (HFE) capabilities to support regulatory and commercial efforts.

Incorporating HFE processes into medical device development, including in vitro diagnostic devices and drug-device combination products, helps manufacturers meet regulatory requirements in key global markets. HFE processes can also enhance device safety and effectiveness by reducing the risk of use errors and improving device usability and appeal. However, establishing robust HFE expertise in-house can prove time-consuming and costly for many manufacturers. OPUS can accelerate the process and reduce the cost.

Developed by the HFE experts on Emergo by UL's Human Factors Research and Design team, OPUS features streamlined access to training, templates and tools that facilitate the effective application of HFE. Key features include:

Medical device and technology manufacturers, regulatory affairs advisors, and educators, among others, may register on OPUS at the complimentary Core Level, which includes access to guided HFE process and productivity tools. Or, they can upgrade to the Premium Level, which gives them access to a large collection of training modules, HFE document libraries and additional resources.

"Medical technology manufacturers recognize the need to apply human factors engineering intensively during product development, but demand for HFE expertise can often outpace the capacity of internal teams," says Michael Wiklund, general manager and director at Emergo by UL's Human Factors Research and Design practice. "With OPUS, we're providing a digital solution that enables medical technology companies to build internal HFE capabilities that ultimately will help to improve patient outcomes in an efficient and scalable way.

Check out their schedule and find a VUE event near you in North America.

Every year, CGTech hosts multiple VERICUT Users’ Exchange (VUE) meetings for customers around the world. The first VUE of 2022 will begin in Irvine, CA on April 4, 2022. VUE is an annual event held for VERICUT customers to share ideas and learn about new features as well as tips and tricks for improving performance and efficiency from other users and the CGTech team. VUE is free to attend.

The first set of VUE meetings will occur in North America through the months of May and June is a valuable opportunity to explore how to make the most of the features already available in VERICUT 9.2.2. VUE attendees will also get a first-hand look at what’s being developed for the next major release, VERICUT 9.3.

“We’re excited to get back to in-person VUE events this year to show the improvements made to VERICUT’s current version, like enhancements added to streamline simulation, optimization and powerful options for reporting.” says Gene Granata, director of product management at CGTech.

“Then we’ll show what’s coming in our next major release, VERICUT 9.3. Due for release this summer, 9.3 better connects machines and data to bring VERICUT’s digital twins to new levels of exactness, enabling users to verify that their NC machine and setup match what was verified by VERICUT and collect valuable metrics about machining processes that help all NC programmers perform like machining experts.”

New features in VERICUT 9.2.2 include improvements to core features, improving memory management, graphics, and overall efficiency. Updates to inspection reports and reports provide users with more information such as surface finish callouts, machine metrics, and new cutting condition metrics. X-Caliper and Annotations have also been updated to include 3D and 2D (flat to screen) text for dimensions on annotation planes, text, and font options, as well as multiple leader lines.

To find the agenda, learn more about upcoming VUE events, and register online at cgtech.com/company/vue or call 949. 753.1050.