Page 32 - MetalForming June 2013

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Die Staging a Plant-Cadence Contributor
Before the plant began to upgrade its presses, at least one job per week would fail to start on time, launching the scramble to get up to speed to meet delivery times. That’s no longer the case.“Throughalloflastyear,onlytwo work orders failed to start on time due to unplanned machine downtime,” says McCullah.
As the shop has become leaner and meaner, with no excuses accepted for not starting and completing production runs on time, plenty of attention has steered toward reducing changeover times. And as lot sizes have dropped in the last few years, the frequency of setups performed has doubled; setups
Press Controls
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hours on trial-and-error feed setups to match new press-speed objectives. Feed Advisor instantly provides feedback on whether or not the feed window is suf- ficient, or if we need to increase the window to meet the established feed velocity and acceleration profile.”
Finally, running faster can take a
toll on punches and other tools. Enter an expand- ed role for ton- nage monitoring. “Every die must now use tonnage monitoring,” stresses McCul- lah. “There’s no excuse for turn-
ing it off. Before we upgraded the press controls, our tonnage monitors often malfunctioned, frustrating operators to the point of switching them off. Now we expect no more than one bad hit from worn tooling. RWe’re not quite there yet, but I expect we’ll be there soon.”
This manufacturing dashboard provides ARaymond production managers with a snapshot look at a healthy dose of production statistics. Of note (bottom right corner): year to date, 91 per- cent of its 467 work orders had been completed on time, with only one miss due to machine-related issues and 15 misses due to tooling-related issues.
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