3PM Technologies

Technology is a funny thing. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs start as something else, and so it is with Tool Action Monitoring.

In the mid 80s a not so young, but not so old engineer named Harry Kincaid was working at IRD Mechanalysis on balance machines. Basically, if it spun around, they could balance it. Then someone decided that it would save time and equipment if there was a way to know if bearings were going bad before something catastrophic occurred. Harry noticed that when you measured vibration it would get more severe before something gave way. (Ever noticed how a quarter starts to wobble when it is spinning before it starts to the ground?)

So Harry started measuring vibration and noticed some interesting things that we cant go into here because they qualify as proprietary intellectual property. But he knew he could shut a machine down before the bearings would give out. So he developed a monitor and Automated Tool Action Monitoring was born.

Now, IRD was bought by an English firm (insert your own “English Engineered” joke here) and they decided tool monitoring wasn’t part of their core business, so in November of 1990 Harry started out on his own with ATAM systems.

Soon, ATAM became a family business, and his son Jerry joined the engineering staff, and they proceeded to improve the monitors, add Live Process Visibility, and have touch screen panels on the monitors. To this day many of the first ATAM systems are still keeping processes safe and saving manufacturers from making bad parts.

3PM Technologies came on the scene in 2009 and bought all of ATAMs intellectual property and equipment and hired Jerry as its lead engineer and Harry sits on the Advisory Board. So 3PM has two decades of experience at its disposal and the capital to research the next generation of tool monitoring.

So, if you just have an old monitor war story, or a suggestion of what you would like to see next, we would love to hear from you