How much does set-up time cost?
LINEA SPINDLE REDUCES PRODUCTION TIME AND DRASTICALLY REDUCES SET-UP TIME TO ONLY 15 MINUTES.
Working days are very often characterised by a succession of commitments. The era of Amazon, smartphones and the net evolving at a relentless pace has led the end buyer of a product to want it more and more quickly. It may seem to you that this text has nothing to do with this company, but in fact it does.
The product that the end user wants always passes through a production process that requires minimum processing times. In all of this there is you, who is reading this article and who lives production and has to rack your brains every day to figure out how to reduce production time to meet the ever more pressing demands for turned parts. You can hardly reduce machining time, and no matter how good your operators are, machining time can hardly be reduced unless you want to lose the level of quality, but I don't think that's in your plans…
So how can this dilemma be solved?
Certainly technology has made great strides: today we have tools that allow us to machine parts much faster but, what most manufacturers do, is to concentrate only on that, very often maintaining outdated configurations while limiting development and design costs.
This becomes almost a nonsense, having a high-performance machine in the production phase while maintaining old solutions for retooling and part changeovers. But not everyone (fortunately) designs in the same way.
I have been designing innovation for 40 years…
Oh, yes! For 40 years I have been designing turning machines to improve production, first by finding solutions that allowed very high productivity and very high precision, and secondly by investing in research and development to drastically reduce set-up times.
But let's start from the beginning: I have always talked not only with company owners but also with production managers. If you're the owner, don't hold it against me, but you don't always have in-depth knowledge of the problems of production, unfortunately you are very focused on looking at the numbers, which have to be constantly growing in order to keep the company going, and, unfortunately, production downtime for set-up changes does have a cost, and it is also very expensive.
If you are a man on the front line, you will understand why I want to meet these people. They are the ones who have their finger on the pulse of the situation and who list the problems, but very often also the solutions, but no one thinks about putting them into practice. Thanks to this massive amount of information (or rather list of problems), I have put a lot of effort into creating a system that would make the dreams of those who produce come true.
In addition to decreasing production time, I reduced set-up time by drastically reducing it to just 15 minutes.
The secret, which is not a secret but the fruit of years of work and experience, was to divide the machine into two parts, allowing one of the two to continue working with almost no interruption. The rest is done by the ergonomics of the machine, which allows accessibility that is difficult to repeat with multi spindles and transfers.
Obviously all in absolute safety for the operator.
So to answer the question of reducing set-up times without limiting production or limiting quality, the answer is yes!
It can be done by combining three key ingredients:
> Listening to requirements
> Design
> Experience
Thanks to these three fundamental ingredients, it was possible to get the answer.
If you would like to know more, you can contact me and we will talk in depth together; you can also request my book for FREE by clicking here!
See you soon.
Gianfranco Sala
