Keeping one step ahead with in-house machining

The company develops components and systems that help banks stay one step ahead of the criminals. To maintain its lead, Cennox has an active research and development program that requires numerous parts to be machined with relatively short lead-times.

In addition, it also has production parts to manufacture in order to back up the service it provides to banks in repairing damaged cashpoints. In the past, all of this machining work was put out to subcontract, but as demand grew the cost and delays that this created was impacting on productivity, so the decision was taken to investigate bringing machining in-house.

Iain Ferguson, technical and operations support manager, explains: “We were faced with two challenges: the cost and delays of subcontracting all of this work and, the fact that we had no experience at all of machining. As we would be starting from scratch we needed to find a machine tool supplier that would work with us to bring this project to fruition.”

After investigating the market Cennox chose Matchmaker CNC to supply the machine it required as well as providing extra support in pulling together a tooling and CAD/CAM package (Sharp CAM). The choice of a Matchmaker VMC 1020 vertical machining centre, with its 1,100mm by 560mm table that allowed multiple set-ups to be in place at any one time was a big advantage to Cennox, as some components require six operations and to have them all on the table simultaneously improved productivity and manufacturing costs considerably.

Typical savings over subcontracting these parts is running at around 75% per component. With initial batches running at around 400-off, and ongoing batches between 20 to 30-off, this is a major saving. Added to this is the elimination of lost time while waiting for parts to be processed by a subcontractor.

Given Cennox’s lack of machining experience part of the Matchmaker CNC role was to provide ongoing support through its applications engineering department. The department worked alongside experienced R&D machinist/programmer, Craig Wilson, who was brought into Cennox for the project.

“The help we received from Matchmaker was excellent, Craig machined our first parts in a cycle time of one hour 20 minutes; he then tweaked the program and reduced that to 45 minutes per part and we were happy with that. Then, sitting down with Matchmaker’s applications team we have reduced cycle time even further, producing each part in 34 minutes,” says Mr Ferguson.

Making use of the capability of the Matchmaker VMC 1020, the productivity at Cennox, compared to what was being achieved through subcontract, has dramatically improved. With its 8,000rpm, 7kW spindle and 10m/minute cutting feedrate capability, and its Fanuc 0iMD control system, it is making short work of the volume of parts required. Typically, Cennox’s subcontractor would have used two machines to produce 12 parts per day for Cennox. Now, with the single Matchmaker VMC 1020 in-house, Cennox is producing the same number of units per day with a marked improvement on dimensional accuracy and overall quality.

“Considering that our starting point was no machining experience whatsoever, we were probably a unique proposition for any machine tool company, given the size of our business. We therefore had to place a lot of trust in Matchmaker to supply us with a machine and support that would deliver what we needed,” says Mr Ferguson.

“That trust was well placed as we now have a machining facility which we are confident can produce anything that our design department comes up with and deliver it in a timely manner,” he concludes. “The machine has delivered everything that we expected and the support from Matchmaker has made the whole project run smoothly from start to finish.”

MATCHMAKER CNC www.matchmakercnc.co.uk