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The New Way is Advanced Automation
You Don't Stop the Night Train at Nu-Way
by Jim Lorincz
Editor-In-Chief
Tooling & Production
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The Shear Brilliance FMC punch/shear machine combines processes into one lean manufacturing operation. |
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Steve Southwell pretty much sums up the way many American manufacturers in the fabricating and metalforming industries regard the competition from low-cost manufacturing countries like China: "How are you going to compete with companies that have labor costs of pennies an hour, all the workers they need, and a government with a desire to put them all to work - even if it's just pushing buttons for elevators?" he asks.
Southwell, who is president and
CEO of Nu-Way Industries Inc., Des Plaines, IL, quickly adds that the answer
for U.S. manufacturers is found in adopting automation that
leads to unmanned operation - as much as possible. "It's the only way to minimize
the impact of the advantage in labor costs that these overseas manufacturers enjoy," he says. That's why Nu-Way invested more than $6.5 million in an Advanced Automation Center, which includes a new building to house state-of-the-art sheet metal fabrication equipment from Finn-Power International Inc.
| The Express Bender automates complex bending and the operations cycle from loading full size sheets to unloading bent parts. |
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"We really had no choice but to make the investment," says Southwell, "if we wanted to continue to grow in serving a global market with engineered and manufactured products for our customers here and abroad." Currently, Nu-Way Industries supplies its precision metal products customers in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Israel, China, and Taiwan, in addition, of course, to the United States. China is the country that really started Nu-Way on its current path toward adopting the most advanced automated metalforming equipment.
The company, which was founded by George Howard
and his brother Joe in 1968, over the years had grown from
a small welding job shop to a vertically-integrated precision
manufacturer of thousands of high quality precision metal
parts, housings, and electronic enclosures. Throughout its
history, Nu-Way had been no stranger to adopting the latest
manufacturing technologies and even had developed a few of
its own. A listing of the company's equipment and quality
control capability fills seven panels of an 11"x16" page
folded vertically. Its 400 employees work on a variety of
machines, including turret punch presses, CNC press brakes,
and laser cutting machines in operations controlled and managed
by a sophisticated CIM/CAD/CAM network. The company, for
example, built its own robotic welders, has 12 high-precision
Toyo Koki electric press brakes, and three conveyorized paint
lines. Processes performed include shearing, perforating,
forming, grinding, polishing and deburring, machining, welding,
spot-welding, assembly, and finishing.
Nu-Way's CIM/CAD/CAM is networked on five
servers with ERP software providing visibility for all phases
of manufacturing from quotations through scheduling to accounting.
Quality control is maintained through calibration of all
gages to NIST standards and certification to ISO and Mil
Spec standards. Southwell points with considerable pride
to Nu-Way's "job shop within a job shop," a fully equipped
tooling area set aside to handle special orders, rush orders,
and prototype work without interfering with the company's
production flow.
A showcase of productivity
 Parts
begin as full size sheets, delivered to the Express Bender,
after processing on the Shear Brilliance. |
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Nu-Way's Robotic Press Brake is a 138-ton unit with a 10-foot bed tended by a free-standing UP165 Motoman robot. |
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| Laser Brilliance combines a 3.5kW laser with Finn-Power's hydraulic 30-station, 30-ton turret punch press and linear drive technology for extremely fast and accurate positioning. |
That's a pretty
good snapshot of Nu-Way's capability before it began investing
in its Advanced Automation Center (AAC). In early 2001, the
company was acquired by Steve Southwell, a long-time employee,
and Mary Howard, an attorney and the second oldest daughter
of George Howard. "We had worked together for a long time
and weren't ready to let go of a company that we had worked
hard to establish in our industry," says Southwell.
"The investment seemed like a good idea when the metalforming industry was going
great guns before the telecommunications bubble burst in late 1999," says Southwell.
What happened next was the influx of competition from China and pressure from
at least one of Nu-Way's multinational customers to match the price of product
from China or to source it from China.
"We had no choice but to adopt the latest in automated sheet metal processing
to remain competitive," says Southwell. To house the Center, Nu-Way built an
adjoining 62,000-square-foot building on its 13-acre site, bringing the Nu-Way's
total manufacturing and office space under roof to 300,000 square feet. The Center
has become a showcase stop for Finn-Power's sheet metal fabrication equipment.
The capability of the Center is ideally suited
for the products and the volumes that Nu-Way produces. They
include chassis and enclosures for the telecommunications,
gaming, and security and protection industries, among others. The range
of materials processed includes stainless steel, aluminum,
and cold rolled steel in thicknesses from 0.028" to 1/8".
The centerpiece of the automated sheet processing
system is Finn-Power's
Night Train Flexible Manufacturing System (material management system),
which is the inventorying and material transporting center for four machines:
the Laser Brilliance, Shear Brilliance, EB Express Bender, and the Robotic
Press Brake. The Night Train FMS provides a total solution for unmanned
operation for sheet metal fabricators by automating system control, as
well as material flow within the system. This includes supplying raw
material as well as removing and storing finished product. With the Finn-Power
FMS, Nu-Way can begin with a full-sized sheet, load, punch, form, unload,
stack, robotically transfer the part to the automated bender, bend, and
unload the finished part without a human touching it during production.
Punch/shear/bend
The Shear Brilliance Flexible Manufacturing
Cell punch/shear combination features linear drive technology,
an unloader stacking system with buffer storage, and unloading
robot. It combines the operation of a 33-ton punch with 60"x40" right angle shear. The Shear Brilliance consolidates manufacturing
processes into one operation and, in effect, becomes the service center
for other cell activities.
Material is delivered to the Shear Brilliance
for punching and shearing, then passes through the various
sorting systems for small parts, while the large sheet goes
into the stacking buffer robot (with a turnover capability
to handle any special job application such as louvering)
and then loads into the Express Bender to execute the bending
process in a virtually unmanned environment.
The Express
Bender with stacking robot is capable of bending 0.125" cold rolled steel
in 10-foot lengths and 10" deep. It automates complex bending with accuracy
and has last bend negative capability. It can fully automate the operations
cycle from loading the sheet to unloading the bent parts.
The Express
Bender works the edges of the panel, which is especially
well-suited for the panels that Nu-Way manufactures. Generally,
the process starts at the external edge of the sheet and
continues to the inner part of the sheet, working one side
after another in sequence until all bends are completed.
The sheet is loaded onto the working table and the manipulator
pushes it against the positioning pins. The manipulator holds
the workpiece firmly during all of the manipulation phases,
including forward/backward movement and rotation. The
Robotic
Press Brake is designed to provide unmanned bending at maximum
speed, quicker setups, and changover times, and produce exceptionally
consistent parts. Nu-Way has a Model B125-3060, which is
a 138-ton unit with 10-foot bed. The robot is a UP165 Motoman
robot. By combining the press brake with a robot, Nu-Way
is able to form large or small parts with a variety of profiles.
Accurate positioning for bending is achieved using high quality
sensors for both back gage fingers. Because the robot is
independent from the press brake (not mounted on the press
brake's frame), it has a weight capacity of 143 lb. A 7th
servo axis increases versatility for bending and material handling operations.
Add laser punch combo
The most recent addition to Nu-Way's Advanced Automation Center is the
Laser Brilliance, which combines a 2.5 kW laser with Finn-Power's hydraulic
30-station, 30-ton turret punch. The Laser Brilliance utilizes linear
drive technology for very fast, extremely accurate positioning throughout
the full 3,000 mm (X axis) working area. It can reach axis positioning
speed up to 228 m/min, as well as laser cutting speed of 20 m/min. The
combined performance of Finn-Power's hydraulic system and the fast linear
drive system allow up to 1,100 h/min nibbling speed and 550 h/min punching
speed at 25 mm distance.
| The Night Train
doesn’t stop and now stretches almost
the entire length of the Advanced Automation
Center to inventory and deliver material to
the four Finn-Power machines. |
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As you might guess, programming of the automated
Night Train system is critical. "Finn-Power supplied all the programming
and training both at its facility and at ours," says Southwell. That
included training in programming, troubleshooting, testing, and proving
the system out. "Troubleshooting the machine for programming issues involves
knowledge of applications.and that's all about experience," he adds,
noting that "planning and scheduling the machine are critical. Setup
is not a big deal. You can teach operators the idiosyncrasies of the
Finn-Power machines as well as any others."
The ultimate measuring stick for the Nu-Way's automated system is our
ability to fill its capacity. "It's designed to run 24/7," says Southwell. "We
still have a way to go, but we've gained the competitive edge that we
were after," he says. "Without it, we couldn't begin to compete."
Southwell knows whereof he speaks. He had
gone to China in search of a partner to meet a cost target
set by one of his multinational customers, but he gave up
the search when he couldn't find a satisfactory one with
the quality of product we are able to produce in the U.S.
"What
I have to do is make sure that my price is competitive," he
concludes.
 Reprinted with permission.
Tooling & Production, May 2004.
To obtain a copy of this article,
contact
Tiina Alanko at (847) 885 3200
or tiina@finnpower.com
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710
Remington Road 
Volume
14 Issue 1 -
July 2004