BMS

Belgian Monitoring Systems bvba. was established as a new company in 2007. Before the business was part of the Belgian Barco group under the name BarcoVision. Over a period of more than 35 years the company has been active in the textile world market with a wide range of products, including yarn clearers for OE spinning and winding, weft stop motions, monitoring and manufacturing systems for all textile processes. The product offering is completed with fabric inspection systems based on manual defect input as well as systems based on automatic defect detection. For the dye houses a range of machine controllers is offered as well as process control systems, color and recipe management systems. Brand names belonging to our business are BarcoVision, Loepfe, Treepoint and Sedo. Although the textile activity of BMS counts for 75% of the turn over, the company also offers MES systems to the plastic industry as well as to the pharmaceutical industry.

The main product line of BMS is the MES product, marketed under the name SpinMaster, WeaveMaster and KnitMaster. This manufacturing execution system collects data from the production machines using a wireless data collection network. Machines can be connected to the MES system using a data collection terminal. More modern machines offer a connection from their machine controller to a communication interface. The most recent machines allow direct connectivity using an Ethernet port. All collected data is stored in a relational data base and software packages are available for machine monitoring, fine scheduling, machine settings management, fiber and yarn inventory as well as in process inventory of warp beams and grey cloth. Finally the interfacing with the ERP system is assured through a set of data import and export tools. The main applications sold by BMS in textiles are for spinning, weaving and knitting mills. For weaving and knitting the package is completed by QualiMaster. This part of the MES packages handles the fabric quality control or fabric inspection. Typically fabric inspection is done on the weaving loom or / and after weaving on an inspection frame. In both cases the inspection is a manual process and defects are entered in the system manually. For both types of inspection BMS offers a defect input terminal. The QualiMaster software collects the defects and produces a defect map showing all entered defects with their location in the fabric. BMS offers an optimized cutting software tool. This will allow to maximize the yield in first quality fabric by cutting the grey fabric in such a way that certain defects are cut out. Finally the package provides a set of statistical reports to allow management to follow up and improve the quality level of the mill.

In order to automate the fabric inspection, BMS has developed the Cyclops system. The aim of Cyclops is to inspect the fabric on the weaving loom, thus right after that it has been woven. Cyclops is a camera based vision system. The camera travels from left to right and takes pictures of the fabric. These pictures are processed by the vision software for the detection of the fabric defects. Once a defect is detected, the information is transmitted to the QualiMaster software.

For weavers of industrial fabrics, especially producers of automotive fabrics, BMS offers a traceability package. With this software the mill can trace back where and at what time a certain lot of yarn was used, on what machine and by which operators the production was executed and how the quality was rated.