About K6

Located in Nashua NH, K6 Manufacturing started as a precision machine shop in 1988 using a small 3-1/2 axis machining center.  In 1993, K6 incorporated and began taking hourly software contracts for windows programming.  In recent years, software contracts represent most of our revenue.  Our latest effort (and the reason for this web page) is DCV.

 

Islands of Automation?

How did islands become a metaphor for poor integration?  Islands are often the places best connected to the rest of the world.  Britain and Japan would be the best examples.  Now consider places most unlike an island: Slovakia?  Bolivia?  Chad?  Mongolia?  

 

Islands of Automation actually have advantages?  Decision makers for the “island” have clear accountability.  They can make and execute their decisions more quickly.  The islands that get it wrong, learn from those that get it right.

 

The original point of the islands metaphor was that some problems are best solved on an enterprise-wide scale.  For practices like ERP, enterprise wide scale has significant undeniable advantages.  For CAD integration, this writer argues that islands are much less of a problem.  When did we conclude there is some great advantage to having every engineering in the enterprise use the same design, analysis, and manufacturing tools?  Maybe we should have them all wear the same color socks too?

 

Now we’re going to get a bit more technical

Well there are some advantages to a uniform suite of engineering software tools.  Besides helping with training, the big advantage is a common data format, to enable integration.  Without a common format, translators are necessary and the integration is greatly degraded.  Many articles have been written to explain why translators can’t provide the kind of integration offered by a common data format.  A brief list of the arguments follow:

·         Flavoring – common geometry implemented in different ways

·         Accuracy – one format’s close-enough is another formats error

·         Unique entities – uncommon geometry implemented in one format, but not another.

·         The DCV solution argues that the root problem is the lack persistent entity identifiers and that the problem can be solved without rewriting any translators.  Once you have persistent identifiers, you can repair the other translation issues and automatically re-apply the repairs with each new version.

 Does the idea of virtual persistent identifiers sound impossible?  Ask yourself these questions?

·         Could you manually fix identifiers in an imported file so that they would appear to be persistent?  No one is saying a manual effort would be economical, just could you do it?

·         Given that it could be done manually, why can’t software do it automatically?