Inside CIM this month Metal Cutting: Robotic Milling Tooling: Threading Fabricating: Robotic Welding May 2013 Vol. 27 No. 2 www.cimindustry.com
Building a Better Box New bending technology increases productivity at Five Seasons Comfort Bernard Pinheiro, plant manager, and David Li, design engineer, hold an example of Five Seasons Comfort's newly bent filter box. Nine out of every 10 breaths are taken indoors. Asbestos, mold, and even pet dander in the home can have long-term effects on the health and well-being of families. In a shop the hazards can be even worse. Dust, smoke, particulates, and welding fumes all contribute to allergies and respiratory problems. Five Seasons Comfort Ltd., along with its sister company, Electro-Air Canada, has been manufacturing high-efficiency air cleaning equipment for residential, commercial, and industrial applications since 1962. Every facet of the company s specialized manufacturing process takes place on-site at its Concord, Ont., facility, including product design, production of high-voltage power supplies and air proving switches, as well as complete metal fabrication. The company has achieved success in part because of its visionary outlook that emphasizes helping people with allergies, asthma, and respiratory diseases, including autoimmune diseases triggered by environmental pollutants. In fact, the company s founder, Howard David, first became interested in electronic air cleaners because his daughters had allergies. Over the years the two companies have not only marketed their products under their own brand names, but also created brand labels for many of the world s largest HVAC OEMs and retail chains. 30 CIM May 2013 www.cimindustry.com
Five Seasons manufactures a complete line of residential, commercial, and industrial air cleaning systems, such as electronic, high-efficiency media, and HEPA filtration, including ultraviolet light and photocatalytic filtration technologies. Each product comes out of its modern, 100,000-sq.-ft. facility, 90 percent of which is dedicated to fabrication and warehousing. Each individual product has its niche, and each has its own unique production challenges. Striving for continuous improvement in its product development, the company focuses on improving design, workmanship, fabrication techniques, production efficiency, and quality control. Five Seasons continues to grow and diversify; within the last two years it has been manufacturing a full line of filter housings and filter platforms for gas and electric furnaces and air handlers for both residential and commercial applications. The manufacturer s engineering team is continuously improving production to produce economies of scale with the use of automation. Fabrication and Bending The company manufactures hundreds of different products using galvanized steel and cold-rolled steel in various thicknesses from 14 to 22 gauge. It uses stamping presses, punch presses, and press brakes to fabricate the products. However, as the company entered the filter box business, it was faced with a major challenge. According to David Li, design engineer, Five Seasons had to be more competitive in that market. We tried to make a one-piece construction to compete with our competitors. We tried very hard at the beginning to bend these parts on the regular press brake, explained Li. There are eight bends, and we had to flip the part over four times for the negative bends. The setup times A new CNC panel bender was tasked with reducing the labor-intensive tool setup, programming time, and part handling involved in forming the filter box. www.cimindustry.com CIM May 2013 31
The previous setup time of one hour has been reduced, with new part setups taking as little as 10 seconds when the ATC is used in conjunction with the optional bar code reader and operator instruction display screen. It took eight bends and the part needed to be flipped over four times to create the negative bends. The setup times alone were taking more than an hour. took more than an hour. The company has approximately 115 different stock-keeping units (SKU), with each customer ordering only a small quantity of filter boxes but in various sizes. With the setup of each filter box size taking an hour, the company s costs were increasing dramatically and production was diminishing. The filter box is the product that drove us to search for an alternative bending system to the press brake, said Bob Crowe, technical product manager at Five Seasons. It was then that the company realized that an investment in capital equipment was going to be necessary. Five Seasons had several goals at this time. It wanted to cut the cost of its filter box bending operation, but it also wanted to reduce operator fatigue. The company decided that to meet both goals it needed to move away from a traditional press brake bending operation and produce the parts on a servo-electric panel-bending machine. Five Seasons management chose to install a FastBend machine, built by Prima Power, Arlington Heights, Ill., in the belief that it would suit its needs. This machine was tasked with reducing the labor-intensive tool setup, programming time, and part handling involved in forming the filter box. It also provided the company with additional flexibility with the capability to form different angles, hems, multiple corner radii, Z offsets, and closed tubular profiles with the standard set of tooling. The automatic tool change (ATC) option, automatic feed table, and automatic inversion of positive and negative bending blades also allowed for more bends to be created per side in an automatic sequence without manual intervention. This is what the company needed to reduce the burden on its employees. Now the operator simply loads, rotates, and unloads the part. While good fabricators with loyalty and skills are the key to success for the company, said Li, with new machine automation the hand-skill requirements for the fabricators are reduced, and computer skills become more essential. In a press brake, you constantly need skilled operators who can think through operations in order to do the bending in the machine, explained Bernard Pinheiro, plant manager. [Now we] can take anybody with basic skills and within five minutes anyone can learn to operate the machine and make precision parts because the parts are preprogrammed. It literally works the operator through the bend sequences. You no longer need a highly skilled operator to run the machine, and we can now make the part much faster with a higher degree of accuracy and quality. The previous setup time of one hour has been reduced, with new part setups taking as little as 10 seconds when the ATC is used in conjunction with the optional bar code reader and operator instruction display screen. The operator now initiates a part program by simply scanning the bar code on the part. The instruction screen notifies the operator when the tool setup is complete and graphically displays how the part blank is to be loaded. The result is quality, speed, and elimination of mistakes. Labor Savings With the press brake, the operator functions at a high level at the beginning of the day, but after a few hours 32 CIM May 2013 www.cimindustry.com
of extending his arms to load, bend, unload, and stack parts, he becomes fatigued and production drops, explained Pinheiro. By contrast, [this setup] is much more ergonomic, and all the operator has to do is turn the sheet. There is [now] one continuous speed during the entire shift. Creating the filter box on a single machine enables the company to compete better by reducing labor and material costs. We can now do one-piece job construction, explained Pinheiro. Previously we needed four separate pieces to manufacture the part on the press brakes. The labor and material costs of assembly are very minor with the one-piece construction when compared to when it was made from four different parts. The quality is also much higher. The company is now expanding its use of the new technology into other areas of the business and part families. We want to bring as many parts as possible to the panel bender because setup time is so much shorter. And there are no tolerance stack-up issues with multiple bends as there are on the press brakes, said Li. Removing Bottlenecks One of the things that we ve experienced as a result of the speed of the bender is the traditional bottlenecks in the bending area have disappeared, said Crowe. Even though we had five press brakes, bending was always the place that got bogged down. Also, prior to having the new bending technology on the shop floor, Five Seasons often would overproduce parts. The customer may have needed 100 parts, but we would build 500 because we didn t want to spend the 90 minutes on a complicated setup, said Crowe. Running a leaner operation also means coordinating the shop floor work with job sequencing and inventory control. We use several programs including MRP software to control orders, production, and inventory. Programming is done in the office and networked to the machines, said Li. As part of our lean process, we have also established assembly cells for smooth production and a quick turnaround to orders. b www.fiveseasonsaircleaners. com Five Seasons Comfort Ltd., along with its sister company, Electro-Air Canada, has been manufacturing high-efficiency air cleaning equipment for residential, commercial, and industrial applications since 1962. In a shop-air hazards can include dust, smoke, particulates, and welding fumes, which all contribute to allergies and respiratory problems. www.cimindustry.com CIM May 2013 33