Page 27 - MetalForming May 2009

critical to quality and timeliness. So while assembly is really the primary core competency of the facility, and where R.W. Beckett hangs its hat, the firm has invested in improving a few critical metalforming tasks in recent years, with measurable, quantifiable payback results.
“We manufacture to about 1800 dif- ferent, unique oil-burner specifications,” Norris says, “and when a customer needs a burner in the middle of a cold winter, we must be able to supply it immediately. We’ve designed our factory flow so that there is not a single process with a lead time of more than 1 hr.”
The Winning Recipe: Servo Feed + Barcode Scanning
While the company does not per- form a lot of sheetmetal fabrication, it does make a handful of components it deems as lead-time sensitive. To man- ufacture air tubes—rolled and spot- welded cylinders 4 to 24 in. tall—the firm operates a coil-fed press that shears to length, pierces holes and notches all in one blanking die. Cold- rolled steel, 16 gauge by 12 in. wide, feeds into a 30-ton mechanical press. Norris describes a recent project to optimize operation of the press line to improve productivity and “mistake- proof ” the process.
“Lot sizes range from one to as many as 200, but generally they are very small, so we used to expend a lot of labor doing changeovers, as many as 20 per day,” Norris says. “To minimize changeover time, we acquired a servo feeder (from P/A Industries, Bloom- field, CT), and then set out to electron- ically link our business and produc- tion-control system to the feeder.”
More consistent quality and reduced scrap—basic goals of many metal- forming-improvement projects—were quickly realized with the project, says manufacturing engineer Paul Rodjom. “Before we brought in the new feeder, every first part at the start of a new run would end up in the scrap bin,” Rodjom
Newly designed assembly cells at R.W. Beckett locate assembly workers in the center, facing out to access parts bins filled by a crew of shoppers, as well as their workstations. There’s no turning and twisting, which has led to a significant gain in productivity.
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METALFORMING / MAY 2009 25
says. “The operator would have to meas- ure the blank length and adjust the feeder to hold the required tolerance, ±0.030 in. Now we get a good first-part off every time, and hold a length feed- tolerance of ±0.003 to 0.005 in.”
To connect the firm’s production- control system to the feeder, Rodjom married a barcode reader to the setup, with barcodes corresponding to feed length. “This eliminates another oppor- tunity for error,” he says. At setup, the operator scans the barcode, which inputs the required feed length into the feeder’s memory. “We generate the barcodes with a standard font in Excel or Word,” adds Norris. “Scanning bar- codes to set feed length rather than having to keystroke a length into the controller saves us 2 to 3 min. per setup, and—with 20 setups per day, and, therefore 20 opportunities to make a mistake—the process has become mis- take-proof.”
Barcode Application Number Two
So satisfied with its first barcode scanning to help manage servo-feed setup, Norris and Rodjom soon found
another application for the technology. Inside each air tube (described above) mounts a pair of cut lengths of 3⁄16-in.- dia. wire rod, of galvanized cold-rolled steel. These lengths of rod—electrical contacts—traditionally had been pur- chased components, until the firm’s purchasing manager asked Norris and his team if they could fabricate the lengths of rod inhouse.
“We use the rods in 30 to 40 unique lengths, from very short to as long as 18 in.,” Rodjom says. “We had been pur- chasing each length in 25-lb. boxes, an inventory-control nightmare.”
Bringing cut-to-length wire-rod pro- cessing inhouse, the company set up a small pneumatic press, fed, again, by a P/A servo feeder. Wire comes in on 1000-lb. spools; two sets of straighten- ing rolls, a seven-roll horizontal set and five-roll vertical set, straighten the wire before it finds the entry end of the press. There, the straightened wire lands in a groove machined into the feed drum to align the wire for blanking.
The wire-rod cell has not one opera- tor, but several, as the company employs a crew of “shoppers” to move through- out the facility to collect burner parts