Fully Leveraging Machine Uptime (Part 1)

Mold and tool makers are under pressure to reduce their throughput times and unit costs in order to stay in business. How much of a competitive edge do companies enjoy with a zero-point clamping system and a measuring machine? The CEO of WESCHU GmbH ran the numbers.

Standing in front of a ZEISS Contura in the middle of his demo center, Werner Schumacher says, “My ZEISS measuring machines truly do make me money.” Although two of his staff members have heard that sentence numerous times before, they still nod their heads in agreement. The CEO of WESCHU GmbH und Co. KG, headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany, frequently takes potential customers through the large modern building featuring two automated manufacturing cells with multiple milling, erosion and measuring machines. “Here customers can see for themselves how efficient they could be,” says the 73-year-old manager Schumacher. This explains why he and his daughter opted to invest three million euros to construct the demo center.

The CEO has been in this business for 40 years. He gets straight to the point: “Whoever presets workpieces and electrodes on an expensive erosion machine rather than a measuring machine will be out of business sooner or later.” Why? Schumacher explains that, by performing the presets on the expensive production machine, it is only possible to achieve up to 1,500 erosion hours annually.

The challenge: profitability

Kathrin Schumacher, the other CEO and company owner, knows that company representatives who take the time to verify Schumacher‘s calculations and add up the amount of time their machines are actually used for eroding or milling will be “astonished.” Experience has shown that using a machine for production time for more than six hours a day is a rarity. Given such poor machine utilization, Schumacher believes this costs firms over 60 euros per hour, expenses which are then passed on to the customer. Instead of making profit, the companies’ losses pile up. Based on Schumacher‘s assumptions, these can total thousands of euros—per year and machine.

Here, the two Schumachers are in complete agreement: “Whoever just tries to carry on like everything‘s fine is throwing money out the window. They keep doing this until there‘s no other choice but to close their company.” While Ms. Schumacher does not have specific data detailing company closures, she estimates that, within the last 10 years, around half of the mold and tool manufacturers in the Nuremberg region have gone out of business.

Source: Quality Magazine