Why Teknic?
Pioneering History
Teknic, Inc. was established in 1985 and was one of the first pioneering companies to use digital signal processors (DSPs) in motion control applications. Teknic's technical legacy includes several industry firsts including the first all-digital current loop control, the first all-digital d-q indirect vector torque control for brushless motors, the first DSP-based servo drive, and the patented eFoundation™ integrated power distribution, control and safety interlock system.
Exceptional Technical Support
Providing exceptional support is a matter of pride for Teknic, but it is also a matter of good business sense. As you might imagine, selling exclusively to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) requires a long-term, patient approach. It's often two or more years of investment and effort before a client's machine is brought to market. It's essential to everyone that it's a success. We're obsessed with improving the odds of success by creating the best development support process possible. Our focus is to get you to market quickly with the most competitive machine possible and here are a few of the distinctive elements of our strategy to do this:
- Your technical consultations and support will be handled only by a Teknic Application Engineer or Systems Specialist, never by a manufacturer's rep or distributor.
- We will simulate every motion axis using proprietary simulation tools before making any recommendations. This ensures that your actual results will be within a few percent of the desired performance.
- As a result of carefully interviewing you about your project objectives, we can often use our simulation results to suggest design improvements. Frequently, we can recommend small design changes that save significant money while still meeting your objectives, or improvements that increase performance at the same cost.
- Before every client visit, we write (with your input) a careful statement of objectives, and each visit ends with us documenting the visit results and any action items or recommendations.
- Our first visit to your company will focus on actually demonstrating, on your machinery, the performance we have previously discussed and carefully simulated. This greatly speeds time-to-market and reassuringly lowers technical risk.
- An on-site visit to your facility will typically involve two trained application engineers and/or system specialists, packing almost 200 pounds of gear (tools, test equipment, etc.), for two or three full days. We come prepared to work—we're there to help you solve problems, prevent problems, and generally get the most possible from your machine.
- Over the course of your development, we will methodically compile a detailed dossier of the project in the form of a thick, three-ring binder that contains everything we need to efficiently support your project over time. (We can send you a sample of an actual binder so you can see firsthand some of the real-world output of our process.)
All of this engineering and support service is generally provided free of charge because we want our clients to take extensive advantage of all our services. This is a substantial investment of time and money for Teknic, but we know that in the long run providing these services will help ensure our clients' success, and a successful OEM is an excellent investment.
OEM Business Model
Teknic's business model is much more than simply choosing to sell only to OEMs and providing outstanding technical support. Automated machinery OEMs have very different needs from those of automation end-users. Our entire company is optimized for working with OEMs.
Back in the early 1990's, after careful study, Teknic concluded that no single automation company could serve both end-users and OEMs in an optimum way. Therefore, although the end-user market is quite large and lucrative, we decided to limit ourselves exclusively to the OEM market and no longer sell to end-users at all.
On the surface, it may seem odd that we would forego these sales opportunities—the technical requirements seem, at least superficially, to be similar. Our study of this showed, however, that there are not only fundamentally different technical requirements, but there are also numerous distinct non-technical requirements. It seemed we could be more successful and our clients more successful if we focused completely on OEMs, even though we would have to give up all end-user business. So over the years, Teknic transformed itself into an organization unique in the automation industry, an organization optimized solely to meet the unique needs of OEM machinery manufacturers.
This strategy has withstood the test of time, and today Teknic is a premier supplier to OEMs of automated machinery. To understand exactly what this OEM focus means, here are just a few examples of how Teknic is different from the typical automation component company who would love to sell to OEMs but who needs to sell to a large base of end-user customers also (we'll call them "EndUserCo"):
Price, Performance and Technical Support
EndUserCo has a large number of end-user customers, spread all over the country (and world). To reach their customers cost-effectively, they use manufacturer's representatives (reps) and distributors dispersed throughout their sales territory. With so many customers in so many locations, it's cost prohibitive for them to use a direct sales and application engineering force. Although their layer of rep and distributor middlemen adds cost to their products, this is okay because most end-users only buy a small amount of product each and are therefore less price sensitive than OEMs. (Unfortunately for OEMs, EndUserCo must also compensate the middlemen for sales to them.)
The layer of rep and distributor middlemen also helps insulate EndUserCo's technical people from the day-to-day support demands of many hundreds or thousands of customers. This, too, is okay because even though the end-users don't have unimpeded access to the manufacturer's technical experts, end-user applications usually just have to meet a threshold level of functionality; there's not usually a big advantage to squeezing out the last bit of performance. EndUserCo can get away with providing less-than-expert support because end-users—who are typically only buying a small volume of products—are often willing to pay for more expensive products than absolutely necessary just to be sure to safely "overkill" their requirements.
Teknic has fewer customers than EndUserCo, but each customer typically buys a much larger quantity of product. The automation components purchased from Teknic by these OEMs are a key part of their machinery. The components are a large and on-going part of the machine cost and their performance plays a key part in the overall performance of the machine, and thus in the machine's market competitiveness. Needless to say, price is crucial to the OEM, as is expert technical support and product performance—their competitiveness is dependent on it. Teknic offers the 100-piece price on most products to all bona fide OEMs during the development phase of their projects, even though they may only be buying very small quantities.
One of the ways Teknic created a price and technical support advantage was by divesting ourselves of all reps, distributors and even internal salespeople. In their place we built up a team of highly trained application engineers and system specialists to directly support our smaller number of higher volume clients. This eliminated a lot of cost and allows expert technical support. It also means that Teknic can no longer effectively sell to the vast population of end-users.
Long-term Availability and Stable Lead Time
Long-term availability and stable lead times are essential for OEMs. Teknic knows that its clients will be making each machine model for many years and it would be a great disservice to them to obsolete any of the components they've designed into a machine. EndUserCo obsoletes a product when its volume is too low (which is either because it's a failed new product or because a new product displaced it), or because parts are no longer available to build it. Teknic largely avoids both of these problems.
With respect to new product introductions, Teknic uses a platform approach that allows for incremental (yet often groundbreaking) innovation to existing products while retaining backward compatibility. As one example, Teknic's SSt-1500 servo drive, (which looks identical today to the unit introduced in 1994) has undergone numerous upgrades to improve its price, performance, functionality and reliability, yet a current unit can still drop in to a machine application designed in 1994. This development philosophy means there is not a lot of pressure on Teknic to obsolete older products even if they're running at low volume—the platform always runs at high volume even if individual models do not.
As for parts availability, the platform development approach limits the number of unique components that we need to worry about. Beyond this, Teknic has spent a great deal of money and effort on building a sophisticated supply chain management system and a risk mitigation program that assures a stable source of raw material. Based upon lean techniques including single piece flow, poka-yoke (foolproof) assembly, end-point configuration, rapid changeover and Kanban buffers, this system has proven that it can supply reliable product with predictable, short lead times even in times of high volatility and short raw material supply. Teknic control products are religiously tracked from "cradle to grave" by a specialized IT infrastructure that includes links into all test systems, burn-in systems, raw material inventory controls, client orders, return processing and engineering change management. This system is not only used to assure delivery, but also to track product in the field and to provide rapid manufacturing feedback to improve product reliability.
EndUserCo knows that reps and distributors thrive on new product introductions; backward compatibility isn't so important, just introduce new models as often as possible. To avoid a proliferation of products, EndUserCo simply obsoletes products that no longer sell in volume. Teknic can't afford to do this because it would seriously alienate its entire client base; EndUserCo can't afford not to do this...and it doesn't matter to their end-user customers anyway because they'll just buy the latest model. With respect to lead times, EndUserCo develops contracts with distributors to stock the small amount of inventory to take advantage of immediate, short-term sales opportunities. Stability and low volatility of lead times are less important.
Quality and Reliability
Some of Teknic's cost advantage (gained by eliminating middlemen) is invested in our intensive on-going program for assuring product quality and reliability. With an all-OEM client base, Teknic needs to have significantly higher quality and reliability than EndUserCo. Why? OEMs buy much higher quantities than end-users, so they're statistically more likely to experience product failures. An end-user that buys ten servo drives is very unlikely to see a failure no matter how bad EndUserCo's failure rate is. An OEM that buys a thousand servo drives per year is much more likely to see a failure eventually. OEMs also have, on average, more automated axes and I/O per machine. This means the likelihood of seeing a machine failure due to an automation component failure is higher for the OEM than for the end-user. This is why Teknic can not tolerate failure rates that would be acceptable for EndUserCo. Moreover, at some point, it's cheaper for EndUserCo to lose a few (typically small) customers due to reliability issues than to spend more money on incremental improvements to reliability. Teknic invests too much in each client to risk this loss. To back up all our talk about reliability, all our motion control electronics, even high-power servo drives, come standard with a three-year warranty.
Application Engineering Services
As stated earlier, our OEM clients always work directly with Teknic application engineers and system specialists. Although, it's obvious that this will provide them with more highly qualified support, the breadth of our support is surprising to many. The list of standard services provided by Teknic is quite extensive:
- Simulation of all motion axes, including sensitivity analyses
- Value engineering of mechanics
- Recommendation of best-in-class components
- Electrical schematic and harness review
- Drafting of production cables and harnesses which interface to Teknic products*
- Machine safety reviews
- Sub-system performance evaluation
- Electrical integration of Teknic products on prototype machines*
- Electrical auditing of control signal fidelity and timing
- Performance measurement and reports on motion fidelity
- Pre-production total machine audits
- Creation of configuration files and cables for third-party motors
- Robust servo tuning of axes to be tolerant of manufacturing variability and product aging
- Vibration analysis*
- Delivery of test tools and systems to check out Teknic products*
- Software training
- Porting of machine control software to Teknic controls*
These services are provided routinely, on an as-needed basis, on-site, and/or in Teknic's labs, generally free of charge†. The effect on our OEM clients' time-to-market and machine reliability are impressive.
To further enhance the development process and make our support efficient and consistent, Teknic engineers create and maintain extensive documentation for each OEM project. For a sample of this documentation, contact Teknic and ask for a sample "OEM Machine Documentation Binder".
† Services which are marked with an asterisk (*) may, at higher levels of service, require a consulting fee.
Innovative Products
Over the last decade Teknic has produced a steady stream of state-of-the-art, proprietary motion control features making it easy for our clients' machines to perform at industry leading levels. These innovations include:
- Electronic Inertia Matching Technology (IMT) for adaptive control of difficult loads
- Regressive Auto Spline (RAS) to process move profiles for ultra smooth motion and low machine vibration
- SmartSaturation™ to handle inadvertent voltage or current clipping gracefully during motion
- Advanced Velocity and Acceleration Estimators to reduce quantization noise for tighter, more accurate control
- AntiHunt™ technology to keep axes still at the end of moves
Because of this, in application after application, Teknic's SSt digital servo drives have proven to be the superior choice compared head-to-head against competing products.
ControlPoint™ Distributed Controls
ControlPoint is an open, distributed motion and I/O control system that has grown to include servo motor control, stepper motor control, analog and digital I/O, power distribution and machine safety control—all seamlessly controlled from a single powerful software API. ControlPoint customers have profited from numerous innovations:
- Seamless, intelligent, interrupt processing that allows simple event-driven applications to be written as if all devices were local to the control computer (i.e., not having to manage or worry about the network)
- Local (on each control node) user-definable logic functions that allow simple or complex control responses in microsecond timeframes
- Built-in automatic network diagnostics to pinpoint network hardware and wiring problems quickly
- The highest physical I/O density available in any machine control product: greater than 3 I/O points/cubic-inch (including solid-state relay-type outputs, digitally filtered inputs and diagnostic LED indicators). This allows I/O to be located easily at the point of control, minimizing harnessing and overall machine size
- DigiLog™ inputs (analog inputs with digital thresholds and hysteresis control) that allow users to tailor the input noise immunity and speed of the inputs, and to monitor sensor aging and degradation
- Control power distribution built into the network cable to minimize wiring even further
eFoundation™ Machine Power and Safety System
The eFoundation is a single, rack-mountable unit that provides power control, power distribution, and safety interlock management for automated machinery. This 2U, 19-inch rack mountable unit provides an easy path to safety certification by incorporating all required power and safety functions in a single unit.
Safety requirements (as dictated by CE standards, for example) dictate very specific control and filtering of machine power, as well as the control of the interlocks that protect machine users. The design and development effort required to perform this power control, distribution and safety interlock management is quite considerable, yet no competitive advantage is gained by doing it well. There is, however, a big penalty to pay for doing it poorly. In most applications, the eFoundation eliminates 80 to 90 percent of this design effort and risk, comes fully assembled and tested, and only costs a little more than the uninstalled pile of components it replaces.