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  • Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) Helps Advance the Science of Machining at Micro-Mechanics

  • When I started Micro-Mechanics nearly 30 years ago, you could really think about your business

  • machine by machine. You could uby a fairly complex piece of equipment but you could bring

  • it in and within a day or two you could be up running. Those days, in my opinion, are

  • gone. The type of system-built equipment that were running now is much more complex.

  • It’s really all about engineering and you need very, very strong partner and engineering

  • help from the OEM.

  • In our engineering development line that weve partnered to develop with Makino we have three

  • a61 machines running on the MAS control system. Our aim is to maximize the productive hours,

  • and for us what that means is to do any and everything we can to get 168 hours out of

  • each spindle minus a five percent allowance for service. 24/7 machining means that there

  • are going to be some hours where a human is not there to attend to a machine or process.

  • Knowing that up front, the number one requirement is all the machining processes have to be

  • repeatable. And by that we mean that we need to know that when we start machining we have

  • a predictable quality outcome.

  • The second key fundamental is we need to move setup from online process to offline processes.

  • We did a lot of careful engineering studies where we looked across all of the world class

  • manufacturers of machine tools. And, in fact, when we assembled an engineering group for

  • 24/7 machining we even went to Europe and looked at some of the best machining companies

  • in the world to try to understand what they were doing. And from that, we decided that

  • Makino had the leading edge among all other suppliers.

  • First of all, great, repeatable, robust maintenance-friendly equipment. And secondly a control system that

  • brings many machines together to act as one, where we felt that we could automate, truly

  • automate, all of the many process that otherwise have to be done by humans.

  • When youre running a business where the core competence is engineering, we have to

  • apply our engineering skills against real-world problems. And one of the biggest problems,

  • especially here in the United States, is how do we close cost gaps, how do we produce faster

  • and faster for a marketplace for our customers that’s increasingly volatile and unpredictable.

  • We need to not only produce a perfect part, but we need to do it on time and we need to

  • do it faster and faster in smaller and smaller batches, and very cost effectively. We think

  • the only way to do all of that, to really align with the realities of the marketplace,

  • is through 24/7 machining. 24/7 machining by definition is youre getting more and

  • more productive hours, those productive hours lower cost, they reduce cycle time, and sort

  • of the derivative of all that is you can’t produce lots of hours if you don’t have

  • a great quailty process.

  • So, the 24/7 really brings everything together. Better costs, better quality, shorter cycle

  • times, smaller batches, that’s really what our customers are asking for.

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) Helps Advance the Science of Machining at Micro-Mechanics

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