FORMING AND FABRICATING AUTOMATION
No Choice but to Automate A increases without adding people.
utomation has become the only option for stampers in a growing number of cases. The value of the parts a company can stamp, assemble and ship by adding automation to a line often and easily will exceed the automation investment. Factory output
Let’s roll the clock back to a time when high-volume metal formers drove the implementation of pressroom automation, rushing to replace hand-transfer operations with coil-fed pro- gressive dies and transfer dies with mechanical transfers. Often, however, stampers running lower production volumes could not justify the investment in automated lines, and so they leveraged manual labor to move parts along line dies or from press to press. Now, however, as we all know too well, with fewer people in the workplace it’s becoming more urgent to automate lower-vol - ume production. Fortunately, where in the past the math didn’t work, modern automation has become less costly and more flexible, and easier to justify for lower-volume jobs. So says Todd Wenzel, owner/president of TCR Integrated Stamping Systems, Wisconsin Rapids, WI, a turnkey provider and systems integrator—whether a metal former needs to improve existing equipment or requires an entirely new production system. Case Study—Automating Hand-Transfer “One of our clients,” Wenzel continues, “an OEM manufacturer
of consumer goods, recently reported significant gains from automating a hand-trans- fer line where multiple oper- ators moved parts through multiple presses. First, a great deal of work in process (WIP) accumulated between each tool/press. The first stage was coil-fed, the remaining all hand-transfer, and output aver- aged 200 parts/hr. We added a
Contract metal stamper and fabricator Tenere employ this automated three-press tandem line to run what traditionally would have been hand-transfer production. The line features three Aida straightside presses, and an AP&T blank-destacking system and its Speed Feeder press automation used to transfer parts from press to press. Tenere can run one or multiple tools per press, and has the option to run all three presses with automation together, or run just one or two of the presses along with the automation, leaving the remaining press(es) available for hand-transfer work.
larger-bed press and automation to the line, while continuing to coil-feed the first die station. The automation eliminated WIP and output doubled to 400 parts/hr. And, when stamping smaller parts, the company retooled the line to stamp two out per stroke, so that output rose from 200 to 800 parts/hr. “In addition, he continues, “while the reduction in manual labor due to the automation varies by job, on average we helped this customer reduce the amount of labor related to material han-
dling by 80 percent. We also eliminated lost production caused by the scrapping of cosmetically sensitive parts that experi- enced scratches and dents during hand feeding. This allows the
manufacturer to now sell—for profit— thousands of parts per year that oth- erwise would have been scrapped.”
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