Agreement Expands Motion Plus Miniature Precision E-commerce Portfolio

Pittsburgh, PA: Motion Plus today announced a partnership with MICRONIX USA, LLC. Motion Plus is now distributing MICRONIX USA products. This partnership provides a wide array of MICRONIX USA miniature precision piezo stages and motion components available for purchase online through the easy-to-use Motion Plus website at buy.motionplusmore.com.

“With the high quality, miniature precision products of MICRONX USA in-stock with our storefront, customers can now solve nano-positioning applications quicker than ever.” says Ben Furnish, Co-Founder at Motion Plus. “With these products ready to ship, customers can significantly reduce the time it takes to get results in their research or product design process.”

Manfred Schneider, the President of MICRONIX USA, is enthusiastic about the opportunity. “We are excited to collaborate with Motion Plus to make our extensive standard product line available through their website. This collaboration enables MICRONIX resources to expand our focus on OEM customers while Motion Plus will support end-user and non-OEM customers. We are especially pleased to offer a large selection of our products through their quick ship, in-stock option to help customers accelerate their product development processes and experiments.”

The benefits of this new partnership include.

• High performance MICRONIX USA piezo motion components in-stock and ready to ship
• A one-stop shopping experience for MICRONIX USA products with additional items
• Easy to use filtering tools to help find the right MICRONIX USA product

About Motion Plus: Motion Plus provides an online storefront for selecting and purchasing motion control, automation products, and more. With in-stock products, easy-to-use selection filters, and an array of help tools – Motion Plus works to deliver the best customer experience for buyers who want products quickly and efficiently. From precision miniature piezo stages, linear motors, rotary motors, through servo and stepper drives or multi-axis controls; Motion Plus has the products you need to solve your next automation challenge. Learn more at: www.motionplusmore.com

About MICRONIX USA: Founded in 2006, MICRONIX USA specializes in miniature- micro- and nano-positioning components and systems for the life science, spectroscopy, microscopy, optical and research markets. It is noteworthy that MICRONIX USA is the only company based in the USA that designs and manufactures miniature positioners based on the stick-slip piezo principle. Learn more at: www.micronixusa.com

For More Information Contact:

Ben Furnish / Jeremy Miller @ Motion Plus

Manfred Schneider @ MICRONIX USA

I’m sure you’re familiar with the long days and short nights when you need to work a tradeshow. For anyone who has experienced it, you can sympathize I’m sure. So now as we ice our aching feet and soothe our sore backs, it’s time for a Photonics West 2022 recap.

Photonics West 2022 On a Positive Note…

Photonics West 2022 was located at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. It was packed with technical presentations for approximately 3100 conference attendees and about 950 different companies exhibiting their products to another 2900 exhibition attendees. If you are in the photonics space, this show should be on your radar.

1. The show had focused attendees. So many of the people we spoke with at the show were on a mission. This mission was one of two things. The most common goal respondents were trying to achieve revolved around the technical sessions. Numerous people commented on the strength of the technical sessions and the ability to continue gaining knowledge with respect to an area they were focused on around Photonics or imaging applications. The second and more obvious goal we heard over and over again was that attendees were trying to stay on top of the market.  Attendees wanted to see what changes were coming and what was new from the exhibiting companies.
2. It wasn’t just local attendees. This might sound obvious but remember – this event took place in the midst of the COVID-19 Omicron variant spike, in a city that had stringent health requirements. Couple these facts with the pain in traveling internationally right now (health test requirements, flight cancellations, pilot shortages, winter weather disruptions, etc) and it might be surprising to learn that many attendees braved the travel pains to come from international locations. The appeal for Photonics West 2022 continues to be a global appeal based on who we saw in attendance.
3. Photonics is on the same trajectory as semiconductors, just much earlier in the arc. This was an interesting conversation that more than one person discussed with us. Respondents likened the photonics industry and the burgeoning advances in quantum computing to where the semiconductor industry was years back. Imagine the advances in computing that will continue to take place as the photonics space advances as well. The outlook continues to be positive for this space.

But It’s Not All Positive…

This was the first tradeshow I attended since February of 2019. I wasn’t sure what to expect and I knew big companies had pulled out of this show in the weeks leading up to it. Photonics West 2022 disappointed me because of 2 main things.

1. San Francisco. Location, Location, Location. Yes, I will admit, I’ve been in love with the city of San Francisco since I first traveled there in 2000. The city had a sort of je ne sais quoi about it that I enjoyed. That city is no more. The city is no longer anything of beauty. The trash, the general degradation of the city, and the crime is evident everywhere you look. I would advise SPIE to move this tradeshow and any future tradeshow out of the San Francisco area. I suggest San Diego, Charlotte, or Orlando during that time of year these cities are cleaner and more visitor friendly.
2. Attendance was a fraction of prior years. Shocker, I know, a trade show during a COVID spike has low attendance. With companies dropping out and expected soft attendance ahead of the show due to the current environment, I am surprised the event didn’t go 100% virtual. If you want to see how soft attendance was, look at the image above for aisle traffic during the show on day 1 and day 2. For the cost of travel, risk of COVID infection, and cost of displaying – the payback for exhibiting at this show may not be there unless you met the right customer with the right need. I will say it was interesting seeing the so many empty booth areas, they offered a nice place to take a phone call or rest your feet after walking the show for hours. There was even giant checkers and giant chess game with which people occasionally interacted.

But What About Motion Plus?

We had the fortune to be in attendance with 2 of our key suppliers, Aerotech and MICRONIX USA. On display in our booths, we had an assortment of optomechanical products (like optics holders, manual slides, rotary positioners), motorized positioners (like piezo stages, linear precision stages, and rotary positioners), and an array of drives and controls. If you missed our showing, you can see a small sampling of it on the Motion Plus company page on LinkedIn.  These products garnered a good bit of attention and opportunity as customers are still finding out about our marketplace and the benefits of working with Motion Plus. Even in the Photonics industry, our in-stock solutions offer benefits over longer lead time products. It was a record trade show for us with respect to the number of customers we spoke with.

Final Thoughts…

All in all – while attendance was extremely soft (less than 3,000 exhibit attendees) those attendees that did show up, were very focused and brought opportunities to exhibiting companies. The photonics industry seems poised for continued expansion and accelerating growth. Ultimately I’m betting you can find us again at Photonics West 2023.

New Partnership Enables Immediate Delivery of Precision Motion Products

 

PITTSBURGH, November 15, 2021 – Aerotech Inc., a global leader in precision motion control and automation, and Motion Plus, an e-commerce distributor, today announced a partnership to sell many of Aerotech’s most popular standard products at www.motionplusmore.com. The Motion Plus marketplace offers a wide range of motion control products, including many in-stock Aerotech products available for immediate shipment.

“With this partnership, we are now able to offer our customers the convenience of online ordering and immediate delivery when they don’t require a custom solution,” said Aerotech President Dr. Robert Novotnak. “Our customers now have the flexibility to work with us through a consultative buying and support process or get immediate delivery of standard products when they know exactly what they need at the start of their project.”

A one-stop-shop for Aerotech and other affiliated brands, www.motionplusmore.com gives customers:

• Immediate Delivery – Customers can receive Aerotech’s most popular products days after placing their online order.
• Product Selection Assistance – Filtering tools make it easier to select the correct Aerotech product.
• Online Support – Online chat and a growing community help forum provide immediate access to answer questions.

“We’re excited to include Aerotech’s high-quality, high-precision motion control products in our online storefront,” said Motion Plus Co-Founder Ben Furnish. “Stocking these products opens up a world of opportunities for customers who need precision motion components quickly.

About Aerotech

Since 1970, Aerotech Inc. has been the global industry leader in precision motion control and automation. From standard positioning technologies and control systems to custom-designed automation systems, our products support research and industrial organizations worldwide. Aerotech solutions enable manufacturing, testing and inspection processes on a micrometer and nanometer scale for the world’s best-known technology companies in industries such as aerospace, consumer electronics and medical devices.

About Motion Plus

Motion Plus (www.motionplusmore.com) provides an online storefront for selecting and purchasing motion control automation products and accessories. With in-stock products, easy-to-use selection filters, and an array of help tools, Motion Plus delivers a convenient customer experience for buyers who want products quickly and efficiently. From precision miniature piezo stages, linear motors, rotary motors, through servo and stepper drives or multi-axis controls, Motion Plus has the products to solve the most common automation challenges.

Media Contacts:

Amy Toth : +1.412.967.6854

atoth@aerotech.com

Ben Furnish: +1.888.668.4660

bfurnish@motionplusmore.com

Significantly increased lead times, learning to work as a remote team, and learning to work without certain tools or resources: these were just some of the challenges 2020 handed us. Adaptive businesses overcame many hurdles around working in a remote environment. Resilient workforces evolved to work with changing tools and are doing quite well with those challenges. The one remaining hurdle 2020 gifted us, is a significant increase in lead time for many products.

5 Tasks to Do Now for Better Lead Time Management

Is your company still dealing with the challenge of expediting products needed for a customer ASAP? If so, take a look at these 5 tasks. Your company should already be addressing these options to address difficult lead times for parts.

1. Update resource planning tools with actual lead times. Ensure you are ordering with adequate time for delivery

   • Long lead times can be planned for and addressed properly, the variability in lead time is the real problem that hurts production planning. If your resource planning system is programmed to order a servo drive 2 weeks before the instrument or machine is due, but the real-world lead time for that servo drive is 10 weeks – you are set up to fail before the order is even placed. Failing to have the correct lead time in your system also results in efficiency loss. Your team will spend extra time expediting with your supplier wasting time for both companies. Also, your customer service team will spend extra time working with your customer, responding to their order status update requests. Update your resource planning system with the current lead time for your purchased products to ensure the system operates effectively.

2. Update resource planning tools with adjustments to safety stock levels. Keep production flowing

   • Once you know how long it takes to get the part, adjust safety stock levels. This ensures you cover any production gaps or product shortages. Simply knowing it takes six weeks to get a linear motor instead of two weeks, implies you need to move your linear motor safety stock to cover at least 6 weeks of consumption instead of 2.

3. Revise forecasting models ensuring the changes in sales are accounted for in the model

   • The more your lead time impacts your customer demand, the more flexible your forecast needs to be. If you lose 50% of your imaging instrument business due to a 10% increase in the lead time of an XY precision linear stage inside the machine, make sure your forecast accounts for this. If this demand change isn’t taken into consideration, you will quickly build up inventory that will likely sit on your shelf until you have enough of the right inventory to reduce your lead time again. This ultimately creates a whipsaw process with oversupply periods and undersupply periods versus customer expectations over a given timeframe.

4. Explore new suppliers who stock items instead of companies running a just-in-time (JIT) process

   • The above options are there to react to the increased lead time issues. Exploring new suppliers is a task that can help you find a solution to fix your lead time expansions. As noted by Brightwork Research – Internal projects to reduce lead time have been proposed for decades by Lean and Six Sigma evangelists as a type of fools gold. These types of resources typically subscribe to a philosophy that ignores constraints in the supply chain. The complexity of the parts that make up a machine derail the concept of getting everything there just in time. There is no substitute for having the products in stock, on the shelf, ready to ship. Find suppliers and companies who have in-stock motion components or are willing to stock for you. Qualifying a new supplier in your system can be challenging, but the reward may be well worth the effort.

5. Find alternative parts with better lead times where it makes sense (this can be challenging in certain regulated environments)

   • If you need a 2-stack servo motor quickly but are getting quoted extended lead times, explore the option for a longer stack length servo motor. This task will require engineering and purchasing to work together to find an alternative product that will still meet the key application requirements. When executed properly, finding substitute products can result in significantly reduced lead time.

Ultimately the answer to reducing your lead time may not involve the same supplier or exact part number you bought at your last purchase cycle. Your traditional supplier may not have solved their material lead time issues either, which in turn will impact your order and your customer’s satisfaction. Find alternatives to the traditional route, if possible find companies that carry your product in inventory. For some “inventory” can be a bad word, but having the right in-stock motion components eliminates most of the challenges caused by lead time variations.

In-stock Motion Components from Motion Plus Including Actuators, Drives, Motors, and More

At Motion Plus we have a significant amount of inventory that many companies deem too difficult to stock. Our inventory contains:

• Precision linear actuators (Aerotech PRO stages, Micronix PPS stages, and more) fully built, configured and ready to ship
• Linear and Rotary motors (servo or stepper) ready to ship
• Precision miniature piezo stages on the shelf and ready to ship
• Motion Controllers and Servo, Stepper, Piezo Drives (PWM and Liner) packaged and ready to ship

If you would like to know more about what is in stock, click here and log in (or create) to your account to see product availability and in-stock options.

Optimizing your motion system to yield the best results can be tricky. However, there are a few tricks you can do which will help mitigate some of the challenges.

1. Maximize System Stiffness

Ensuring your system meets aggressive performance requirements begins with the system stiffness. It will be almost impossible to maximize system throughput if the system is not stiff. Systems that lack stiffness can be susceptible to vibration which will decrease overall performance.  To maximize system stiffness, you will need to ensure your system has a very high resonant frequency (more on frequency response here). This can be done with additional mass into the non-moving base of the system as we as designing cross members to stiffen the system in the direction of motion.
Stiffness is also impacted by the tuning parameters and controls of the system.  With a very loosely tuned system, speed will be sacrificed and therefore throughput will suffer.  To ensure you have maximized system stiffness, make sure you are taking advantage of advanced tuning methods.  In very aggressive move profiles, it may also make sense to use Harmonic Cancellation, Enhanced Tracking Control, or Iterative Learning Control to help optimize your tuning beyond bode plot analysis.

2. Optimize System Repeatability

Don’t overpay for what your application requires. Often engineers can confuse repeatability and accuracy. If you truly need raw accuracy, your system will cost significantly more than a similar system with the same specification for repeatability. Repeatability ensures your system can perform over and over again to the same position, whereas accuracy ensures it performs to the exact correct position.  If the actual position is slightly misaligned (repeatedly) with your target position, controllers can easily account for the misalignment based on the target versus actual position using maps and equations.  The result is a system that is optimized with a faster response time and higher throughput. Factors like ball screw grade, bearing preload, bearing design, surface flatness, and more will also all impact your repeatability.
Another thing to take into account is the number of axis in your system.  Calculating 3D system repeatability is complex and is not as simple as adding up each individual axis value. It will be important to know the point of interest appropriately for the repeatability value at hand.
For more on accuracy versus repeatability – check out this video.

3. Mitigate for Thermal Expansion

As the system operates, it heats up.  Friction in the screw, power in the linear motor, and all the motion in motion will generate heat.  In a high-frequency system, this heat can be substantial and ultimately impact the overall system performance.
As the system heats up, the various moving components expand.  Because many of the system components are made of different materials, these components will expand at different rates.  As this thermal expansion occurs, the system will begin to degrade in performance accuracy, repeatability, and eventually even throughput. To mitigate this risk, you will want to use similar materials wherever possible – this will ensure equal thermal growth rates.  Alternatively, it’s possible to oversize the system so that the heat generation is negligible relative to the system itself. Other options include processes to remove heat from the system such as air cooling with a fan, liquid cooling solutions or chillers, or duty cycle pauses to eliminate heat generation.

4. Choose the appropriate controls plan

You may be able to design an adequately stiff, repeatable, and thermally stable system, but you will inevitably fail to get your system to move the way you want if you aren’t using the correct controls. If you have a feedback control process that you are adjusting the PID loop, a very popular algorithm, you will be able to move the system to a point and the system will automatically adjust itself until it actually reaches this point.
Learning to tune through the PID loop is challenging and very time-consuming as every change impacts the other variables. Unless you have a Ph.D. in Control Design, you may want to opt for a more user-friendly push-button process. A finely tuned system will give you the ultimate system performance.
Aerotech’s control tools will make tuning much easier with an Autotune feature – just press a button and the system determines the correct gains for your setup. Or optimize the tuning parameters even more with a bode plot, a phase and a gain plot which allows you to use simple up and down buttons for more phase and gain margin (more stability in the system and more ability to reject disturbances), or automatically fit filters wherever you want.
Additional Aerotech controls features include Harmonic Cancellation, Command Shaping, Enhanced Tracking Control, and Iterative Learning Control – these advanced controls options will ensure your system performs to the maximum capability and highest throughput.

5. Partner with experts & Learn from the past

Lastly and most importantly – reach out to others, use your resources, and listen to the advice of those that have been there before.   There are numerous applications with the same challenges you face.  Because of this, many have gone before you and overcome the same hurdles. This advice is probably some of the best I can give you.  Because others have blazed a trail already, they may also know pitfalls you have yet to consider. Learning from those that have already completed their journey will greatly reduce your time to success.  Some tools which may help you reach your goal quicker include:

• The Aerotech Educational Library – Aerotech.com
• The Motion Plus online forum/community – Community.Motionplusmore.com
• The beginners’ guide to motion control – Motion Control & Motors Association

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, feel free to chat with us now or reach out via email, we’re happy to help you achieve your goals along your automation journey.

Motion Plus is dedicated to providing our customers with the best options for the products they need. As we focus on these needs we will be continually growing our platform and expanding our product offering. These additions will enable you to come to one easy-to-navigate website where you can easily find and buy all your needed components. As we continue to grow our platform of products (better serving your needs), we’re excited to announce 2 upcoming new additions to our portfolio. These additions will help round out the products you may need when implementing an automation solution.  Stay tuned here for our news with more details about the timing of the additions and the product line specifics.