Machine monitoring repays many times over

For Colin Smith at HPC Engineering, a relatively modest investment in a Seiki Systems machine monitoring system, for 46 CNC machine tools, has been repaid many times over.

For Colin Smith, production manager at HPC Engineering, a relatively modest additional investment in a Seiki Systems machine monitoring system, made on the back of an already planned DNC facility and installed base of some 46 CNC machine tools, has been repaid many times over.
He said: "I need good quality information to do my job properly and this system provides it.
It cost very little to install and the training requirements were minimal.
However, it gives me a near instantaneous window on what's happening in terms of machine utilisation that an army of progress chasers could not."

He describes how information extracted from the monitoring system which has some 25 terminals located on the shopfloor, has allowed the identification of breakdown trends, capacity surpluses and shortfalls.
"Not only has knowing the state of production been a big factor, it has helped in the purchasing decisions on new equipment, and even been used to direct our sales team to sell capacity that we know we have - as opposed to think we might have.

In all, this helps to make us a more efficient and professional organisation.
And the beauty of it is, the system has performed that way virtually from the day it was installed," he maintains.
HPC Engineering is split into three divisions.

The original company was founded in 1959 by Sir Gawaine Baillie Bt and now embraces a hydraulics division and a compressors division as well as the precision engineering division.
Total employee numbers are around 220 divided between four sites in Burgess Hill, West Sussex.
The precision engineering division is a respected supplier to the automotive and motor sport sectors, medical and electronics manufacturers as well as some internal supply to sister divisions.
It is a 24 hour day, five or six day week operation producing high precision components - mainly from aluminium or cast iron - in batches as small as just one up to thousands that have to be supplied against close customer requirement schedules.

Three temperature controlled areas housing very high quality machining systems allow production tolerances of 0.005 mm to be maintained, while general machining tolerances in the range 0.012 mm can be sustained.
The company is a major investor in precision machining systems for milling (machining centres), turning (up to five-axis) and honing.
Significantly, it is also a heavy investor in tooling and peripheral equipment with the intention of maximising productivity.
For instance it maintains a large stock of 'spare' pallets for its machining centres, each furnished with in-house developed fixtures to ensure rapid changeover from one job to the next.
Similarly, because all tooling is pre-set and off-sets for the original tool kit are loaded with the CNC program, any set-up time is minimised.

Colin Smith explains the company philosophy: "Where it is feasible, we develop cell-based manufacturing for our customers which can mean dedicating a facility with six or more machines to their needs.
In most cases, the cell production scheduling is controlled by the customer directly.
Each is manned by a multi-skilled team and has all the facilities needed to take material in at one end right through to a completed, inspected component in customer-specified packaging, ready for dispatch."
The company has even gone to the trouble to lay a high strength floor throughout the works so that machines can be moved around at will to satisfy changing production patterns.
"The aim is to have the flexibility that we need to do the best job in the shortest possible time," he says.
Running the factory is a highly complex operation.
However, this is made simple by the willingness of the management to manage and trust the workforce to perform their tasks.

The original planning and allocation of major resources is vital in the strategy but the fact that day-to-day cell management is devolved, arguably deprives Colin Smith of a yardstick by which to measure efficiency.
The question for him is, not only are customers happy, but is there additional capacity that can be utilised or a recurrent problem that needs to be addressed.

To achieve this, he needs current and accurate information.
"There are various automatic machine monitoring systems available but we considered they would go against our in-house philosophies," Colin Smith explained.
"We also felt that we would get more detailed, useful information from a manually operated system involving the workforce, provided it was easy to operate.
The Seiki Systems monitoring package satisfied those criteria as it is menu based, with menus basically configured for 'Activity' and 'Status'.
For example, the Activity could be 'Machine Stopped' but the Status outlines the cause such as breakdown, awaiting work, tooling, or operator.

HPC has 25 'workshop hardened' terminals with up to four machines linked into each.
This ensures the information is collated in real time.
The data can be accessed by supervisors, Colin Smith and HPC directors in a variety of ways according to their needs.
One screen, for instance, can show all machines on the shopfloor as icons with current status depicted by colour.
Clicking on the appropriate icon gives access to more detailed information.
Archived utilisation histories for each machine, each cell or the entire shop are literally just a mouse click away.
In addition, pie charting of utilisation against potential availability can be demonstrated and immediately printed out.
In addition, each machine, or cell can be monitored against its own customised calendar of expected utilisation showing normal, overtime and closed hours.

Colin Smith enthuses over the system because it is fast, accurate, reliable and makes his job easier.
"Instead of relying on gut feeling, we can make positive decisions on investment or personnel deployment based on quantitative data.

In one case, we were able to identify a recurrent fault on a particular type of machine and alert the supplier who then scheduled a remedial modification for us outside production hours."
I've even had customers and suppliers who've been amazed at the information we can extract.
Some have subsequently purchased similar Seiki Systems machine monitoring and, once installed, have confirmed, like me, it was one of their better decisions," he adds.