Cutting downtime through software automation

One sure-fire factor in its growth was the ability to identify and implement the necessary technology into its process chain. This was never more evident than the automated tooling process envisioned by production supervisor Craig Rollag and brought to fruition with the help of Tebis CAD/CAM software.

Tennant Company's tooling is produced in-house and consists primarily of weld fixtures containing anywhere from one to 50 components. The tooling operation is high-mix/low-volume to the extreme, meaning each component is run only one or two times before moving onto the next in line. These components contain a large number of holes, totalling thousands each month that require machining. This high-mix approach calls for a CAM software that can output multiple complex programs in a short period of time.

The problem Tennant kept running into was machine downtime. At one point, 40% of run-time was spent cutting air. As Mr Rollag dove deeper into what drives Tebis, he pictured a streamlined process that would all but eliminate this bottleneck. How? By automating the programming process through Tebis feature recognition.

Tebis can automatically identify holes, pockets and other features based on size or colour and assign predefined process steps downstream in the software. Once a component is scanned, the software begins to populate a corresponding program based on what the scan reads. The cycle time for each tooling component was consistently around 30 minutes. The process of scanning a component and developing a program in Tebis takes about two to three minutes. Compare the two and it is easy to see how the issue of machine down time was eradicated.

Mr Rollag says: “With our previous software we had four programming seats to support four machines. With Tebis we have managed to get that down to one seat and the machines can’t keep up with what we are programming. Furthermore, this was all done within a year of making the switch to Tebis.”

The switch didn’t come without some resistance however. Change can seem overwhelming in a machine shop environment where every minute is crucial to the bottom line. Roy Knafla, one of the Tennant's CNC programmers, had spent the previous 20 years of his career using a competitor’s software. When asked how the change to Tebis was received, he comments: “There is no question Tebis is advanced software; once you get your head in it and understand how it operates, you will never go back.”

Tebis www.tebis.com/uk/en/