It Pays to Partner

Over the past several months we’ve had the opportunity to partner with a very large job shop, and some of our Partners in THINC, on a very interesting project that had a pretty impressive outcome. Our customer makes parts for the automotive industry, and Sandvik asked them if they’d mind if they apply their new PrimeTurning™ method to their process to see if they could create some efficiencies. The customer was open minded enough to say yes, and they provided some parts for the project. In short order, Sandvik approached Okuma and asked if we could work together using our machine at the Partners in THINC facility in Charlotte. We decided to use our LU3000 EX 2-turret CNC lathe.

An Exciting Project

As an Applications Engineer for Okuma, I get the chance to work on lots of new and exciting projects, and I jumped in with the Sandvik team which also included Mastercam, another member of Partners in THINC. Mastercam has partnered with Sandvik Coromant to bring the industry’s first automated CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) support to PrimeTurning methodology. As a team, our goal was to prove the concept that process time could be greatly reduced for this part by using a 2-turret lathe rather than the single turret that this customer currently uses. In addition, we wanted to demonstrate the cost efficiencies created by PrimeTurning methodology. The team got to work on the process for this test cut. When it was complete, we invited our customer in for a visit where we demonstrated our new process. I provided a breakdown of each step along the way, so we could compare various stages of the new vs. old processes.

New vs Old Processes: A Comparison

• The customer’s current cycle time is 1:43 minutes using a single turret machine.
• Just by applying the Sandvik and Mastercam tools, we achieved a 33% time/cost savings.
• When we added the second turret, so we can have two turrets engaged in the part at the same time (which we have for almost the entire length of this particular cycle), we cut the time in half.
• All of these changes brought the cycle time down from 1:43 minutes to 34 seconds.
• With the volume of parts this customer runs, we estimated a cost savings of around $4 million per year.

Being Open to Innovation

I share this story not necessarily to wow anyone with outcomes or numbers - though I have to admit we were pretty excited about that, and so is our customer. The bigger picture here is a takeaway that can apply to almost any shop, and that is being open to innovation. The customer welcomed us to work on a test cut for them and provided us with parts. On our side, we had productive partnerships in place so we knew our teammates, plus we had a well-equipped “sandbox” to play in at Partners in THINC. In the end, our customer was completely surprised by the massive impact of our novel approach. It just goes to show, sometimes it pays to partner.

Chris Peluso is Lathe Applications Engineer, Okuma America Corporation.