“GONE IN 60 SECONDS” perhaps you remember the movie with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie where a team of professional thieves specialized in the theft of cars and scored thefts of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche and so on.

Do you remember why they managed to score all the shots without ever being captured?

They Completed Their Mission Fast!

Gone In 60 Seconds

In the world of production today is the same thing, if you do not have speed in changing the piece you’re dead, or rather, on one hand you need the flexibility to quickly adapt to the needs of your client, but if you only have flexibility (traditional machining centers) and you lack speed … you are dead before you begin ..

On the other side, if you only have speed in producing (transfer machines) but your batches keep getting smaller and smaller, and you do not have the speed to change the piece, you will get to spend more time equipping the machines instead of producing.

Which Is The Right Mix Then?

Obviously there is no fixed rule for everything.

To produce very large volumes of parts with few part changes, the transfer remains the best machine.

For very small quantities, however, the machining center responds well.

On the other hand, there is a new and increasingly growing range of quantities that can be identified in batches from 500 to 5000 / 10,000 pieces, in which the transfer and the machining center cannot  produce competitively and I can explain why:

Let’s Try To Hypothesize To Produce A Lot Of 3000 Pieces

With the transfer machine I will have an important machine tooling time: once put into production, I produce 3000 pieces, I assume to have 15 units and a cycle time of 8 seconds, the result is that after 6.5 hours maximum 7 hours I find myself again to equip the machine for another day.

For the same piece but on a machining center I have to consider 15 operations (15 units x 8 Sec) with a time of 120 sec to which I must add the tool changers and rapid dead times (14 changes x 5 sec per change) 70 sec, and a change pallets of another 8 sec for a total of (120sec + 112sec + 8sec) 198 sec.

• With 198 sec per piece, you can produce 18 pieces now
• in 8 hours 145 pieces per turn
• to complete the 3000 pieces you need 20.7 shifts.
• If you do 3 shifts it’s 7 days
• if you do 2 shifts, it’s over 10 full days
• and at one shift obviously 20.7 working days

If Your Customers Expect These Times There Is No Problem …

… Or You Must Make Your Stock By Putting A Value Of Money Stopping You By Reducing Your Liquidity

But if you have customers that DO NOT WAIT and you are not willing to put mountains of money in stock, there is a NEW way to be FLEXIBLE AND PRODUCTIVE and to produce 3000 pieces to be competitive.

With the FLEXIBLE PRODUCTION method applied on the MULTICENTER and with the new rapid production change systems you can change the piece at the speed of light!

Gone In 60 Seconds!

We were able to create a system that made it possible to break down the wall of 60 seconds so that you can change part fixtures in under 60 seconds!

With this system you can really switch from one production to another in less than 5 minutes total, having already the tools in the tool changer, no longer engaging the toolmakers in long set up but leaving them directly to the operator, only the change taking place.

The machine will take care of the rest, including the operations of recording angular units that on the transfer had to be done manually, while here are numerically controlled angles.

To Demonstrate The Advantage Of This System I Made A Video Where You Will See The Change:

“Gone In 60 Seconds!”

In The Video You Will See That You Will Take More Time To ‘Take A Coffee’ Than To Change A Fixture …

Without Any Needs Of Keys Or Operations To Unscrew / Screw …

As you saw in this video, the system has been studied following the guidelines of LEAN MANUFACTURING in particular the SMED concept (Single Minute Exchange Die) that explains how every change of any system must be designed to be quick within a minute, simple and no need for screwing assemblies that complicate operations, minimizing the need for keys.

With this system, we can redefine the SMED concept (Single Minute Exchange Die) and rename it in SHMED (Single Half Minute Exchange Die).

If you want to continue to deepen these topics, fill out the field below to receive

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Maurizio Porta
Expert in Flexible Production