Page 37 - MetalForming-Apr-2018-issue

bumping up required manufacturing space to where the company had to move to larger facilities in Pompano Beach.
Today, Decimal occupies 50,000 sq. ft. with 100 employees working across multiple shifts. Still growing—in the past few years its sales have increased 12 percent annually—and still assessing the latest and greatest, Decimal man- agement walked the aisles at FABTECH 2017 in Chicago. That’s where we learned from Kevin Garey, Decimal’s vice president of operations, of the recent purchase of a Bystronic 6000- W fiber-laser machine along with an Antil 22-shelf material-storage/han- dling tower unit. Kevin and his brother Alan, CEO and president, (Alan and Kevin are Arthur and Priscilla’s sons) later would provide a tour of Decimal and explain how the fiber-laser acqui- sition grew out of the company’s growth on the stamping side.
Having always been active in metal stamping, today, “we can take a cus-
An ERP system ties into Decimal’s pro- duction equipment, including the new laser-cutting cell, to allow paperless workflow control.
tomer from the design phase through prototypes and through short-run to high-volume stamping of 1 to 2 million parts per year,” Alan says, noting that inhouse slideforming- and progres- sive-tool capability supplies tooling for
internal and external customers and provides the flexibility to try out new technologies.
Stamping Acquisition Spurred More Modernization
Decimal’s high-volume capability came courtesy of a stamping-house acquisition five years back, resulting in takeover of a wealth of tooling and machinery.
“That business was old-school,” says Alan, describing the acquired stamping operation and its process of bulk-machining tools. “We had to enter everything into Solidworks and create models. The old company ran on tribal knowledge, and as high-skill people retired, that was being lost. So we had to capture the tribal knowledge electronically.”
This exercise resulted in improved tooling, as converting 2D drawings to 3D models revealed interference issues and design flaws. With all of this data, Decimal created new tool designs and
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