PUNCH PRESS ACTIVE QUALITY
Our client manufactures box cutter knives and knife assemblies. Their hydraulic press stamps out razor blades at a rate of 350 blades per minute from a massive coil of steel. At this high production rate, many thousands of parts would fail quality standards when the die is damaged or when the die is not configured perfectly during the setup process. A slightly less than perfect setup would allow metal fragments to hang up in the die and cause damage to or destroy the die. Variations in the steel coils can cause die cut parts to fail quality standards.
Core Insight Systems coupled a high-speed vision inspection system with a UI-Node. For each part, this custom system inspects 11 different critical measurements and shapes. For any non-conforming point of inspection, the UI-Node streams the data to our Cloud platform. Once in our Cloud, Core Trace’s real-time Pareto displays the top five (5) non-conforming quality metrics. In addition to a quality dashboard, Core Trace automatically keeps their leadership team constantly connected to their press’ performance with both local and web-based notifications. When personnel cannot immediately react to the data, Core Trace automatically shuts down the press after a certain number of non-conforming inspections are captured within a predefined period of time.
As a result of installing our inspection system, the company was able to:
-Prevent premature equipment failures. Within the first three day of using Core Trace, the system detected an excessive number of quality defects and automatically shut down the press on two different occasions. Just these two automatic shutdowns, saved the customer of over $70,000 in unexpected equipment failure expenses.
-Reduce unexpected downtime
-Improve uptime
-Increase factory wide efficiency
-Improve product quality
-Reduce possibility of customer complaints and returns